


What Ice Does

by what_alchemy



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Sex, Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Friends to Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, No underage, Period-Typical Racism, Pining, Rimming, Sharing a Room, Slow Burn, past blanky/crozier, unrequited fitzjames/le vesconte
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:34:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22862608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: Captain Parry’s third Arctic expedition takes a year longer to prepare than planned. It leaves in 1825 with ship’s boy James Fitzjames aboard HMSHecla. Master's Mate Francis Crozier takes him under his wing.This changes everything.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier & Sir James Clark Ross, Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames, Commander James Fitzjames & Lt Henry T. D. Le Vesconte, Thomas Blanky & Captain Francis Crozier
Comments: 141
Kudos: 255
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing romantic or sexual occurs while James is a minor or anywhere close to it ~~no matter how hard he’s crushing~~. That said, this fic is frank about James’s youthful sexuality, though almost entirely through the filter of memory when he is an adult. “Almost” because there is a brief passage in the first chapter in which Francis catches him masturbating and tells him to stop, but there is nothing explicit, predatory, or out of the ordinary happening. This portion of the scene is far tamer than something you might see on a prime time TV sitcom, but nonetheless please enter this fic with your own self care in mind. 
> 
> This story was written for the "confession" square of [my Terror bingo card](https://what-alchemy.tumblr.com/tagged/theterrorbingo). It would not have been possible without [Jouissant](https://jouissants.tumblr.com/), who is far more than a beta. A muse, a brain twin, a fanfic midwife—we should all be so lucky to have a friend of this caliber to shriek at over some cold boyz. ❤️

**1825, HMS _Hecla_**

Francis was about to be late for his shift on watch. While making an accounting of their stores of Allsop’s, he had been obliged to settle a squabble between some midshipmen in which one hotheaded young Mr. Dankworth had earned a punishment to be determined by Captain Parry. As he made his way through the lower decks, he greeted men heartily and by name—he had spent hours the first week of the expedition making sure he knew what each man was called and from where he hailed. He would be a captain someday, and he vowed to earn his men’s esteem. Likewise, he was stern when the situation required it—this was how he would earn their respect.

In the mess, he spied Branwell Ledbetter, a lad of only fifteen lately promoted to midshipman, who was doing exactly the opposite of what Francis had told him to do not half an hour before.

“Mr. Ledbetter!” Francis planted his boots and crossed his arms before the full table and fixed Ledbetter with a look he had cultivated specifically to make ship’s boys piss themselves. Ledbetter and his compatriots, Messrs. Benton, Alberdon, and Wendt, cringed over their meals before sitting at attention. “What task were you to complete for the good of this ship and the expedition entire before taking your leisure?”

“Mr. Crozier, sir—”

“What _task_ , Mr. Ledbetter!”

The boy tilted his chin up and stared into the distance past Francis’s ear.

“I was to make an accounting of all the lemon juice left in our stores, sir.”

Francis raised a brow, and in a trice, the boy was on his feet and had bolted out of sight. Francis fixed his attention on Alberdon.

“And you, Mr. Alberdon? Have you become a proficient of the double fisherman’s knot yet?”

“Yes sir,” Alberdon said with barely contained panic on his face. “I think so, sir.”

Francis let a sigh escape him. How did the boy expect to become a sailor when he had yet to master the simplest of knots?

“See that you do, Mr. Alberdon. I want to see twenty perfect examples in the morning, are we clear?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Crozier, sir.”

Francis took his leave of them and climbed up to the orlop, which was empty of men. He longed to sink into the quietude of it, even just for a moment, but he had no time to waste. As he climbed the rope ladder, however, he saw in the corner of his eye a flash of movement from something far too substantial to be a rat, or even the ship’s cat on the hunt.

Francis paused on the ladder and held still. He heard a slow, creaking scrape, as a door being shut. He hopped off the ladder and turned the corner behind crates until he saw a small, squat door, likely designed for storage. _Hecla_ was a proud, heavy-bottomed bomb vessel with all manner of nooks and crannies, often full of munitions. He pulled the door open despite the way it stuck, and revealed it empty but for a boy—burnished in complexion and streaked with dirt, a harried bundle of elbows and knees with dark eyes that widened when they absorbed just who wrenched open the door.

“Mr. Fitzjames,” Francis said with a sigh. Fitzjames was the youngest boy by two years, and if Francis had been consulted, he would have recommended that Parry decline a ship’s boy so young and green, especially on such a perilous expedition. In addition to the plain disadvantage of his youth, Fitzjames was also smaller than all the other boys, which was a particular torture Francis was more than familiar with as the last boy born amid a passel of sisters. “Explain yourself.”

“I just wanted a bit of quiet, Mr. Crozier sir,” Fitzjames said. He had a plummy accent that set Francis’s teeth on edge.

“I’m afraid a Royal Navy ship is the last place to get peace and quiet, Mr. Fitzjames,” Francis said, though privately he envied the lad for his ability to fit into the storage cupboard. “Up you get.”

“But—”

“Fitzjames. Now.” 

The boy’s shoulders slumped, and he crawled out on all fours before standing at attention before Francis with a face that looked fit to weep. Francis did sigh then. He patted Fitzjames on the shoulder.

“Off you go, lad,” he said. “Get some supper.”

“Yes, sir,” said Fitzjames. He wouldn’t look Francis in the eye, but Francis put it from his mind and made it to his watch in the nick of time. 

The second time he found Fitzjames folded into a storage cupboard, Francis was irritated. The third time, he saw bruises blooming up the boy’s arm, a bloodied scrape below his eye, and tears streaking his dirty face, and a sudden anger flushed through his body. 

“All right, Mr. Fitzjames,” he said when he coaxed him out of the cupboard. “Tell me the names of the villains and I will put an end to this forthwith.”

“It’s nothing, sir,” Fitzjames said, tone belying his words. “A bit of fun.”

Francis passed a hand over his face. He wanted a dram of whiskey, or three. 

“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll discuss this like men.”

Fitzjames’s eyes were bright even in the low light of the lower decks. His smile was hesitant, too nervy as he nodded. Francis led him up to Francis’s own quarters—a narrow sliver of a berth with barely enough room in which to turn himself around. He was finally a master’s mate, and in a few years he would make lieutenant and get three more square feet to himself. 

Francis sat Fitzjames down on his berth and wet a rag. 

“Clean yourself up a bit, Mr. Fitzjames,” he said, “and stay right there while I fetch supper. I shall be very cross if you’re gone when I return.”

Fitzjames’s eyes were wide over a weak smile. He looked like a pup away from his littermates for the first time. Those eyes pleaded with Francis, but for what, he would have to wait to find out.

Francis made his way down to the mess and stood in line. The boy needed water and a hearty meal. He would also need a soft touch and Francis’s promise not to reveal his part in the perpetrators’ inevitable punishment. Conditions would only be worse for Fitzjames if they knew he’d confessed to a superior officer. 

Some hundred feet away, a table of ships’ boys and midshipmen exploded into a round of raucous laughter. Francis craned to observe who was among their number, and saw Dankworth making a rude gesture to the delight of all the other boys. Ledbetter and Wendt were there, as well as Kirkpatrick and Lochlie, Straker and Gilstrap. Something dark and heavy gathered about Francis’s lungs. Fitzjames should be there, partaking in the merriment and camaraderie without a care, but Francis was too much with the world not to realize that whatever they were laughing about, James Fitzjames was at the bloody red center of it.

He balanced two generous plates of salt pork, potatoes and haricots verts with a stein of grog and flask of water and made his slow way back to his quarters, where he found Fitzjames curled into the smallest possible version of himself against the bulkheads. He had unearthed the one book Francis had decided was worth the extra weight: a slim volume on magnetism. He looked up when Francis arrived, eyes even bigger in his freshly scrubbed face.

“Does magnetism interest you?” Francis asked, passing Fitzjames a plate. There was only the berth to sit in, so he set himself against the opposite bulkhead and arranged his own plate in his lap. 

“It’s a bit dense, sir, but perhaps if I studied it more…”

Francis nodded, chewing his pork without wincing this time. Sometimes he wondered if all the salt could be burning his very taste buds off. Fitzjames regarded the food with some befuddlement.

“Tuck in, lad. What are you called at home, Jamie?”

A tentative smile curled the boy’s lips. He shook his head.

“No, I’ve never been called Jamie.”

“Jim, then? Jimmy.” Francis despised the moniker, having been thrown into cow pats twenty too many times by one Jimmy Coyle from down the road, but he needed the boy to be comfortable if he was going to start demanding answers. 

Fitzjames shook his head.

“Just James,” he said. He ducked his head and poked at a potato. He glanced up quickly and then dropped his eyes back to his food. “But you can call me Jamie, if you want.”

“All right, Jamie,” Francis said. “Where’s home for you?”

“Watford,” Fitzjames said, “in Hertfordshire.”

Francis nodded and chewed.

“Brothers? Sisters?”

Fitzjames puffed out his chest and beamed.

“One brother,” he said. “William. He’s going to be a great soldier and we’ll both go all around the world seeing all manner of things, and then we’ll write thrilling stories of excitement and peril!” Fitzjames’s smile faded and his shoulders dropped as he hunched once more over his plate. He brushed a curl out of his eye. He ate some salt pork and glanced up at Francis, who only quirked a brow in response. “He gets seasick, so he couldn’t come with me this time. I could have gone to Eton with him, but isn’t this such a better adventure?” 

Francis’s first thought was that a ship to the Arctic was no place for a boy, especially one so ignorant of the rough society of sailors as James Fitzjames. But he’d heard tell of the same kind of sport made of the boys at those fancy schools, and he was suddenly and fiercely glad Fitzjames had chosen the particular education only the sea could provide over the kind that came with the comforts of land. Here, he had Francis to look out for him. He could have used a champion himself, when he was green in the world and at sea. Francis intended to do a capital job. 

“You and William,” he said. “You rough house like the lads here like to do?”

Fitzjames, who must have been raised in a fine house indeed, knit his brows together in thought, but set down his knife and fork and chewed and swallowed his mouthful before speaking.

“William and I prefer to tag and chase,” he said. “We used to imagine there were horses, and we were knights, and there was a princess to save, so we had to switch off who got to be the dragon, but we’re much too old for such prattle now, you understand.” He put on a brave and dignified expression that told Francis only that he wished he—or perhaps it was William—had not outgrown the simple joys of running madly about with his brother. 

“Your imagination will always serve you well, lad.” Francis smiled and winked, and James beamed again. He popped another bite of salt pork into his mouth. “I have some brothers myself,” Francis continued. Fitzjames’s face lit up. “And many sisters. Brothers get you in more trouble, I think. Depending on their temperaments. Why, one time my brother Eamon pushed me out of a loft and into some hay. Dislocated my shoulder.”

“Oh dear,” Fitzjames said, looking more thrilled than concerned. He leaned forward eagerly, plate and manners forgotten. 

“So I understand, sometimes, that boys can be…enthusiastic.”

Fitzjames sat back and dropped his attention back to his plate. He worked at cutting the salt pork up into little pieces.

“Jamie,” Francis said. “Eamon made it up to me. He took my chores and split his pudding with me. That’s the proper way of it, between brothers, don’t you think?”

Fitzjames nodded.

“Right,” Francis said. “So we know the difference, don’t we, between a bit of fun between brothers and cruelty?”

“I hide so they forget I exist,” Fitzjames said. “How can it be cruelty when it seems they don’t think of me at all, unless I’m in their eyesight?”

“It is a cruelty to do this to someone deliberately.” Francis grimaced. “Whether they think of you in between seeing you or not, it is…a choice they’re making to be cruel, over an extended period of time.”

Fitzjames chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Francis sighed and set his plate aside.

“If it were William on this ship, and he the boy the others were targeting, what would you want to happen?”

Fitzjames’s head jerked up, eyes wide.

“Everyone loves William!” he cried. “It would not be as it is!”

Now there was an admission Francis would tuck away and mull over at a later date.

“It can happen randomly like this,” he said. “No rhyme or reason for the choice. It could just as easily have been William.”

“No,” Fitzjames said, hair bouncing with a vehement shake of his head. “No, it would never be him.”

“Jamie. Listen to me. We can make it stop. We _will_ make it stop.”

“How?” Those big eyes, suddenly blazing, were fixed on Francis. He felt pinned and exposed. For all his boyishness, his excitement and wrigglesome energies, Francis was suddenly aware that there was something of steel in James Fitzjames. “What could you possibly do that won’t make things worse?”

“Punishment is for the captain to decide,” Francis said, throat dry. He tipped back a swallow of grog. 

Fitzjames stared at him for a long while before he dropped his gaze and went back to his dinner. They ate the rest in silence.

It was no matter. Francis knew well the identity of the culprits. 

Captain Parry’s voice bade him enter the great cabin on _Fury_. Francis stepped in and found the captain at his table studying a map of their route. They would be in Baffin Bay in but a fortnight.

“Ah, Francis,” Parry said with a smile. “Please, take a seat.” He sat back and linked his hands together over his belly, regarding Francis with raised eyebrows. He was a kind-eyed man with silver threaded through the waves of his black hair, and he always treated Francis’s suggestions and questions as if they had come from any English sailor of good standing. Francis would follow him to the ends of the Earth and over besides. “What brings you to my door on this fine morning?”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” Francis said. “I know I’m meant to manage the crewmen, but I have discovered a—a state of affairs for which I find myself inadequately prepared. I hope you will offer your guidance, and perhaps a firm hand.”

Parry frowned and leaned forward to plant his elbows on the table.

“That sounds dire indeed,” he said. “Pray, Francis, how can I help you?”

Francis heart swelled. This is the manner of captain he would be, he vowed, not for the first time. 

“It’s the ship’s boys, sir, and some midshipmen as well,” Francis said. “A band of them have singled out one among their number for mockery and sport. A young James Fitzjames, twelve years of age.”

Parry grunted and rested his elbows on the table, hands clasped together. He pressed the resultant fist against his mouth and frowned down at his map, though his gaze seemed to pin itself on a fathomless space beyond it.

“If this is but a matter of boys taking the piss…”

“It’s more than that, sir,” Francis said, and Parry’s gaze flicked up to meet his. He should not have interrupted, but he took a breath and barreled on. “Begging your pardon, sir. He’s sustained real bodily injury. Bruises and cuts and a blacked eye. He also expends so much energy avoiding the other boys that he cannot attend to his duties. He’s—he’ll become a liability if something isn’t done, sir.” Francis pressed his lips together. Fitzjames need never know he said such an unkind thing.

“Have you spoken to the perpetrators yet?”

“Erm.” Francis shifted, and Parry’s eyebrows arched upward again. “I worry it will make conditions worse for Fitzjames, sir, if the others knew he’d told someone of his difficulties.”

Parry hummed and rearranged his legs. He set his hands back on his belly.

“Quite right, I think, Francis,” he said, and Francis gave him a polite smile. “It doesn’t do for a lad to lose face in front of his fellows. I’ll tell you what. Inform the lieutenants and the other mates of young Mr. Fitzjames’s difficulties so they can keep an eye out. Then, when the sport begins again, they may give the lads a tongue lashing they’ll not soon forget.”

Privately, Francis believed a tongue lashing was not enough. The offending midshipmen should be knocked back down to ship’s boys and each perpetrator given a blow with the whip. But Francis was not the captain, and had not a captain’s insight nor preoccupations. Francis thanked Captain Parry and took his leave. 

The next time he saw Fitzjames, he would teach him how to hold a fist, how to jab at the throat and knee the groin. He would make him a lad not to be trifled with. 

The fourth and final time Francis found Fitzjames in his preferred cupboard, he hung a hammock in his own sleeping quarters and installed the boy as a permanent fixture. Francis mourned his private berth and his daily solitude, but Fitzjames took ginger, limping steps, and there was a crust of blood behind his ear which he had failed to wash away. When Francis demanded to see the damage, he was presented with the canvas of James’s body, mottled yellow, green and purple, bruises over fading bruises. Francis couldn’t bear the sight of it. Dankworth and Ledbetter had better pray they never encountered Francis while they were between voyages.

Still, Fitzjames was a prissy little thing. He stood up straight with his shoulders back and his chin up as if he were the rightful little master of all he surveyed, and that aristocratic accent never budged. All dignity, he tried, and failed, not to appear more excited than a child presented with a basket of sweeties, but he was nearly buzzing with it and his eyebrows had taken up residence in the vicinity of his hairline.

“Not too much talk now, Jamie,” Francis warned him. “I like a bit of peace at the end of my day, and we’ll both need our sleep.”

“Yes, of course, Mr. Crozier, sir,” Fitzjames said, but a certain uncontained zeal entered his expression. “Only, do you think the other boys will be jealous? Oh, what should I say to them?”

Francis knew the boy had not a single friend among the others. Even those who did not join in on the sport should have had the moral fortitude to intervene. Francis found them all a shameful pack of beggars and no mistake.

“You will say nothing, because they are not creatures to whom it is worth speaking,” he said. “What did Dr. Ferrier say about—” _everything_ dried up on Francis’s tongue, but he gestured in Fitzjames’s direction and conveyed the sentiment nonetheless.

James turned his attentions to fussing with the canvas bag of his belongings. Bony shoulders rose and fell in a poor approximation of nonchalance, and then he plastered on a great beaming smile that strained both his face and the measure of Francis’s belief.

“I am the very picture of health, Mr. Crozier sir.”

Francis suppressed a sigh. 

“Of course you are,” he said. “You’ll see Dr. Ferrier again if you feel so much as a twinge, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Right. I’m for bed, then. Good night, Jamie.”

Francis snuffed out the lamp and ensconced himself in his berth. He closed his eyes as Fitzjames changed into sleeping clothes, and when he opened them again, the boy was a gently swaying lump in his hammock. Francis turned over and closed his eyes. Baffin Bay in but a week’s time. 

“Have you ever been to the Arctic, Mr. Crozier?”

He had, of course. With Captain Parry on his last expedition. And James Clark Ross, and Thomas Blanky, both of whom he missed dearly this time around. This time, he got James Fitzjames. Aged twelve years. Francis ignored him.

“What will the Arctic be like?”

Francis evened out his breathing. He thought of the nip in the air that would greet them when they arrived.

“Will there be creatures there, do you think?”

“Jamie. Go to sleep.”

“I should like to draw the creatures. I wonder how close we’ll be able to get?”

“Jamie. It’s bedtime now.”

“Yes, sir. Only, do you think we’ll like it?”

Francis sighed and flopped back around to face the lump in the hammock.

“It’s going to be very cold, Jamie, and a lot of work. If the animals are safe enough to stand near, then drawing them will be a great help to us. Now go to _sleep_ , lad.”

“I’ve never been cold before,” Fitzjames said. “Proper cold, I mean, deep in my bones.” He sighed like a girl before a handsome young farmhand. “How exciting.”

“The cold in England can’t compare, certainly,” Francis said. “Is this why you joined the expedition? Exotic ice creatures and the cold?”

Much shifting and then a pair of eyes peeped at him through the hammock. Big white teeth flashed a smile in the dark. Inwardly, Francis kicked himself. He might have to feign a snore to get the lad to calm down.

“Oh yes, sir,” Fitzjames said. “Can you imagine? Creatures never seen by man, forged in all that snow and ice. Feeling the cold in your lungs. Snow drifts.”

“And frostbite and snow blindness and cracks in the ice and ravening ice bears!” Francis exclaimed, and Fitzjames giggled unmanfully. “Really, Jamie, wouldn’t India have been better? The Cape Colony. Brazil!” 

Francis had always wanted to go to Brazil, but a return to the Arctic and its revelations in polar magnetism had proved too tempting when it came time to choose another voyage. He had heard the sights and sounds and smells of Brazil were dazzling, its women vivacious, the food a feast for the senses. Perhaps he would finally go on some other voyage, when he was tired of the poles.

Fitzjames was oddly quiet. Francis held his breath on the hope he might have fallen asleep, but after a few more moments, he did speak again, though subdued.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think I am much interested in such warm climes. All that ice and no one there. That’s for me, I think.”

“There are Natives there, lad,” Francis said. “And you’d best mind them, because they could save your life someday.”

“Oh.”

Nothing else was forthcoming. Francis took the chance and closed his eyes.

Upon sighting Baffin Island, the crew broke into a cacophony of cheers. There was a great deal of bustle and preparations and letting of sails, but Francis dodged and weaved the bodily traffic until he could shimmy down to the lower decks in search of Jamie. He found him in Mr. Lowbridge’s employ, cracking tins and measuring out ingredients. There was a puff of flour adorning his cheek, hair, and shoulder.

“Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Lowbridge, but I’m afraid I’m in need of Mr. Fitzjames’s services.”

Mr. Lowbridge waved a hand and kept up his kneading. Francis bounced his eyebrows at the ladder and steered Jamie toward it by the shoulders.

“Do you have your coat, lad?”

“No, what is it?” Jamie asked. “Did something roll under your berth again?”

“Hurry up, Jamie, for God’s sake.”

“I only ask because I think I should try a cane this time instead of scraping all up and down my arm, and—”

“Jamie! Shut up and get above deck!”

The urge to push him up by his arse was strong, but Francis wasn’t in the business of manhandling boys of whom much sport had already been made. Jamie grumbled but was up the next two rope ladders in a trice like a monkey, and he shivered when the full blast of the Arctic air hit him, July or no.

Francis closed his hands around Jamie’s biceps and pushed him toward the port side of the ship. He handed him a spyglass and said, “Look, lad.”

Jamie peered through the glass and then looked up at Francis, mouth agape, eyes wide. Francis laughed and clapped him on the back. He made an undignified squealing sound and popped the spyglass back onto his eye, slender body nearly vibrating with excitement. Francis slung his arm around Jamie’s shoulder and squeezed him against his side to warm him up.

“Do you think we’ll see walruses?” he asked, his voice gone high and cracking. Francis pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. “Perhaps there will be an ice bear! Are there birds?”

Francis remembered the first time he’d approached the Arctic. He thought he’d never seen a shade of blue that beautiful, and so vast. Islands of ice floated like a painting in motion. Pure white fading into a gradient of teal, edges by turns smooth as the curve of a pearl and jagged as any Irish cliff face. The gentler blue of the sky was punctuated only by serene clouds drifting in watchful quietude. The world was rendered in shades of blue and white, so above as below, and something in Francis had clicked into place like the gears of a sextant. This wild place, this untamed seascape—it was his destiny. He’d always known it.

Perhaps it was the same for Jamie.

_Hecla_ and _Fury_ docked and the crew was in a rush to set foot on the ice and snow. In the flurry of his duties—first and foremost, to take measure of the magnetic fields—Francis lost track of Jamie. Ship’s boys and midshipmen were always the first conscripts for hauling, and Jamie slipped Francis’s mind for the rest of the day as he lost himself in his readings, crewmen bustling and shouting around him in a wordless din. 

He had only just become aware that he was hungry, and probably thirsty too, when he heard it.

“Mr. Crozier! Mr. Crozier, look! Mr. Crozier!”

Francis whirled around to follow Jamie’s voice. He held a mitted hand to his brow to block the blaze of the sun and saw him: an overround bundle in all his layers, complete with Welsh wig and hood. He waved at Francis and said his name again and then tipped backwards into the snow, a puff of it rising up around him like Mr. Lowbridge’s flour. Francis’s heart lurched and he leapt to attention, but he heard the boy laugh as he approached.

“Christ, Jamie, you’ll be the death of me,” he said.

“Look, Mr. Crozier!” Jamie swept his arms up and down, and clapped his legs together and out like a frog. “I’m a snow angel, Mr. Crozier.”

Francis snorted.

“What were you doing before ascending to a higher plane?” he asked. “You’d best get back to it before they tan your hide for dereliction of duty.” 

Jamie popped up, eyes big underneath the hood of his great coat. Francis shoved him back down and crackled as he squealed. Francis threw himself down beside him and waved his arms and legs. The peal of laughter that cracked out of Jamie warmed him, and he closed his eyes against the sun.

“I’ve never made snow angels before, Mr. Crozier,” Jamie said when the laughter died down and he was still. Francis turned his neck enough to see Jamie’s profile—the jut of his nose poking from his hood. “Never had a deep enough snow.”

“We had one once,” Francis said. “When I was younger than you are now. Covered everything for miles in pure white, a sparkling blanket over rolling hills. And everything was so quiet. As if afraid to disturb the peace of it. Hardly looked real at all.”

Francis drifted back to himself from memory only to find Jamie turned on his side in the snow, head propped in hand, staring at him.

“It must be very nice, Ireland,” he said. 

Francis’s mouth quirked up in half a smile. He supposed he should savor those words spilling from an English mouth in that accent. He wasn’t likely to hear it ever again. 

“It is a hard place,” he said, “but a beautiful one, too.”

Jamie pitched himself back and sighed.

“I should like to go someday,” he said. “See your home.”

Francis closed his eyes. Constant rain, and the question of coal in the fireplace. Pervasive poverty, a church that offered him succor even as it stole his peace. His mother, bowed and begging before his father—a pair of people more broken and pathetic, he had never known, and yet it was they who had delivered to him his brothers and sisters, his greatest friends and allies. The green, lush, _aliveness_ of the countryside. The staggering cliff faces. Gentle sheep, and the way people let them pass on the roads. Hot cups of tea and a bit of sugar to dissolve in it. 

He opened his eyes to a blue that seemed crisper for the Arctic cold. 

“It pales in comparison to Hertfordshire, I’m sure,” he said, and sat up. He looked over to find Jamie smiling fondly at him, looking like nothing so much as someone’s doting great-aunt. A laugh snorted out of Francis’s nose. Who was this boy, to make such a face at a grown man? He cuffed Jamie on the shoulder.

“Come on, lad,” he said. “I’ll show you how to read the chronometers.”

Francis let Jamie’s chatter wash over him as he prepared for bed. He supposed it should be annoying—that this, among other things, was partially the reason Dankworth and Ledbetter targeted him—but he also knew that how Jamie felt about seeing the Arctic for the first time was how _he_ felt back in ’21—how he felt now, even. He didn’t have it in himself to quash the boy’s enthusiasm when it only mirrored his own. He was bound by adulthood and decorum; Jamie was not. Francis found himself envious of that, and thus willing to indulge him. 

“…so I simply _must_ get the walruses just so, and I believe I saw a gull of some kind, did you see the gulls, Mr. Crozier?”

“Aye, lad.”

Jamie contorted in his hammock and kicked off with one foot to send himself swinging even as he peered at Francis through the rope.

“Oh, I am beside myself. Do you think we’ll see an ice bear soon?”

“Only through a spyglass if so, Jamie,” Francis said. “They are far too dangerous. The walruses too, I imagine, so mind me and the rest of the crew about any of these birds and beasts.”

“Yes, sir. Which do you think is the _most_ dangerous?”

“The ice bears, certainly,” Francis said. “Quicker than you think they’ll be and mightier than any beast you might have read about safe at home in England. But those walruses are fierce and no mistake. Just lazier.”

“Did you see them all, posing under the sun?” Jamie sighed rapturously. “‘Happy as a clutch of walruses sunning themselves on the ice,’ that’s what I’ll say from now on. Instead of ‘happy as a clam.’ Never saw a clam so happy as those walruses. What else is there, do you think? What did you see last time?”

“Shouldn’t you like to be surprised?” Francis asked.

“Oh no, I must be prepared,” Jamie said. “I cannot be caught unawares, lest I fail to observe, record, and sketch in my excitement.” 

Francis pressed his lips together to keep from grinning. 

“Well there are the seals and the narwhals,” he began.

“What’s a narwhal?”

“It’s a sea mammal, like your walruses and seals, but it’s got a great horn on its head—six, seven feet long.”

“A sea unicorn! Mr. Crozier!”

“I know, lad.”

The slender little body in the hammock buzzed with the force of containing a squeal. Francis’s smile broke through his reserves of restraint. 

“What else?”

“You may see whales of all sorts,” Francis said, “but Baffin Island, if we can get there through the ice, boasts many land mammals, as well. You’ll no doubt eat caribou when we fell some, and you may see musk oxen, and if you’re very lucky you’ll catch sight of an Arctic fox. White as snow and cleverer than you or me.”

“Oh! I should like to see one very much. We used to go fox hunting, William and my uncle and I. I became quite the shot, if I do say so myself.”

“Cunning things. Quick.”

“Beautiful, too. Never saw such a pelt, such a color. What else, Mr. Crozier?”

“There is perhaps the only animal that could challenge the ice bear,” Francis said, lowering his voice. “So you must promise me you’ll never approach.”

In the hammock, a hand splayed itself across Jamie’s chest. Said hand was big and gangly, as if it had grown ahead of the boy it was attached to and waited impatiently for him to catch up.

“I swear, Mr, Crozier,” he said fervently. “Spyglasses only, if it comes to that.”

“That’s a promise you’ve given me, now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I shall tell you, there are wolves on and off Baffin Island. You may think you know what a wolf looks like—what are dogs, after all, but the wolves we made our companions?” Francis stuck a hand out of the berth, indicating a height not dissimilar to Jamie’s own. “Three times the size of the biggest dog you’ve ever seen, Jamie. All hunger and no fear. No need to rely on a man. I’ve seen groups of them swarm caribou, separating them from the herd, trapping and killing them in mere moments. An awesome sight, to be sure, but humbling. This is not your uncle’s sighthound or pointer. This is an animal to be wary of.”

“How fearsome!” Jamie whispered loudly, sounding more thrilled than afraid. Francis settled his head into his pillow and smiled.

“The Natives who live here have wolf skin coats and seal skin shirts. There is much to learn from them.” Francis wouldn’t have Jamie developing wrong-headed ideas about the Netsilik like so many of the other Englishmen. If he could influence him in this one way, Francis would consider himself successful in his mentorship. “If I ever get to be the captain—”

Another squeal and Jamie flopped about in the hammock to peep big eyes at him again.

“When are you going to be captain, Mr. Crozier? Can I join your crew? Can I be first mate?” 

A laugh clapped out of Francis without his volition. 

“Yes, Mr. Fitzjames,” he said. “As soon as I’m captain of my own ship, I’ll call ’round and make sure you’re available to be my first mate.”

“That’s a promise you’ve given me, now,” Jamie said, taking the same warning tone as Francis had, and Francis snorted. Was it his imagination, or did the boy sound faintly Irish when he said it?

“Aye, lad, that’s a promise. Go to sleep now, Jamie.”

“Who could possibly sleep!” Jamie exclaimed. “We’re in the Arctic!” But after a moment he wriggled face-up and Francis fancied he could physically see the nervous energy seep from him as he relaxed into the hammock.

Francis closed his eyes. He thought of sheep, and narwhals, and the impossibility of an endless green beside all this ice.

His eyes snapped open when he heard a sigh and the tell-tale sound of skin on skin familiar to anyone who’d ever weathered the throes of growing up in the barracks with dozens of other men and boys surrounding him.

“Jaysus,” he muttered. He squeezed his eyes shut—maybe the lad would be quick and Francis could simply fade off into sleep and pretend nothing happened, as was the custom around such things. For a moment he missed Thomas Blanky, who always knew a good nook where the two of them could take the edge off without prying eyes lurking about. If Francis were to share quarters with a twelve-year-old, they had both better figure out a more private way to let loose. 

For his own part, Francis had not identified anyone with whom he might share an accord like the one he had with Blanky. It was not the kind of thing one chose just anybody for, and despite the open secrecy of such assignations among crewmen, it was still a dangerous prospect, and one he knew he would have to give up when he made command.

When he fished himself from his reverie, Jamie was still abusing himself, and without care to discretion. Francis stuck his foot out and poked him in the arse with his big toe. Jamie yelped.

“None of that, James,” he said. 

There was no reply but a strangled grunt, and then Jamie flopped about in the hammock before stilling again. 

“Sorry,” he said after a while, his voice small. Francis pressed his lips together. 

“Let us not speak of it again,” Francis said. “Go to sleep now, Jamie. Good night.”

“Good night, Mr. Crozier.”

The ice clogging up Baffin Bay proved impenetrable. Captain Parry sailed west for Lancaster Sound but was yet beset by ice and the going was slow. Parry kept up a good front and was effusive in his praise of his crew’s work, but Francis could see the cracks in the façade, where his frustration and, yes, his fear, showed through. 

Francis kept himself busy. The fate of the expedition was not his to steer. He took magnetic measurements and supervised Jamie taking them as well. He taught Jamie how to set up the chronometers and sextants, how to read and record their findings, how to determine magnetic north. He even began to entertain the idea that someday he and Jamie might build an observation tower together, but it seemed less and less likely on this particular expedition. 

He also had Jamie collect a water sample from each point at which they left the ships. He hummed thoughtfully over Jamie’s sketches of walruses and gulls, seals and caribou.

In late August, a petty officer alerted the crew to the presence of a pack of wolves, and everyone made haste back to _Hecla_ and _Fury_. Francis found Jamie among the press of bodies against the starboard side and gave him his spyglass. The boy looked so bloody grateful it was nearly embarrassing. He kept his glass fixed on the wolves—wolves and cubs, it turned out—long after the rest of the gawkers had gone back to work. 

Later, Francis found Jamie scribbling furiously over his sketchbook, bringing the family of wolves to life on the page, one main wolf flanked by others, and the cubs posed along the bottom of the page. He was a passable artist, careful with the proportions of the beast’s anatomy, the particularities of its articulation. The wolf’s gaze held a challenge, and Francis thought he could spend a thousand years sketching and he would never render something so accomplished. Jamie had the makings of a great sailor and magneteer and artist. Maybe even a great captain. 

“Those will be very useful to the scientific societies back home,” Francis told him.

“I certainly think so,” Jamie said, flipping through the sketchbook for Francis’s fortification. “I do hope to further our understanding of Arctic wildlife. Perhaps someone will collect them in a book of some sort.”

“I’m sure they will,” Francis said. “The Fitzjames Papers.”

Jamie beamed at him in that way he had, where it seemed as though he believed Francis were revealing all the secrets of the universe to him alone, and he bent back down over the sketchbook to sign his name. 

“If any of these don’t have names yet and I’ve been the one to discover them, then I insist something be called ‘the Crozier.’”

“Maybe that very dour-looking beastie,” Francis said, jabbing a blunt finger at Jamie’s drawing of a musk ox who looked none too pleased to sit for its portrait.

“No!” Jamie cried, and flipped through his sketches. He landed on an Arctic fox, who looked like nothing so much as a smirking little face in a puff of white. “He’s very smart and beautiful so it must be this one.” He glanced slantways up at Francis, who could only laugh.

“Oh, I don’t know if he’d like the comparison.”

Jamie’s brows knit together and he pursed his mouth. He looked back down at his fox.

“It’s also a joke, you see,” he said. “Because your hair is red. And if he were in England…” 

Francis clapped him on the shoulders.

“A worthy beast indeed,” he said. “But I’m sure he already has a name. Shall we for supper?”

Jamie packed away his sketchbook and seemed sullen as he trailed after Francis toward the mess. Francis sent Jamie to queue up for food while Francis scouted a table that would soon be empty of the petty officers finishing up their meals. He exchanged pleasantries with and clinked his stein of ale against theirs and exclaimed over the pack of wolves. He was just about to tell them one of the ship’s boys had captured their likeness quite admirably when in the periphery of his vision, he caught said ship’s boy in a heated discussion with another. Francis turned and saw that it was Dankworth, poking Jamie in the chest with one pointy finger. He was tense in an instant, ready to spring to Jamie’s rescue, but he held himself fast. Jamie had so little face as it was; it wouldn’t do for Francis to intervene. 

The two of them whispered furiously back and forth. Though Francis’s line of vision was obscured, he could see Dankworth leering as Jamie’s face pinched deeper and deeper into a frown. Francis watched as he flushed a dark red. Dankworth grabbed his wrist and Jamie wrenched out of his grasp. He stumbled back and a ripple of displacement wavered down the queue. There came a hush, as if the whole mess paused and held its breath. 

Dankworth had several inches and quite a bit of bulk on Jamie, and loomed over him with the sure knowledge of his physical superiority. Francis felt a frisson of pride when he saw that Jamie looked more annoyed than intimidated.

_A quick blow to the throat with the flat of your hand, lad,_ he thought, hoping Jamie could somehow pluck the instruction from the air. _Poke his eyes with two fingers. Bring your knee right up into his stones, no mercy._

There was a flurry and then a crack, and someone cried out. Francis sprang to his feet, but it was Dankworth sprawled out on the deck, clutching his bloodied nose. James looked up at Francis across the mess, astonished. Blood tracked down the middle of his face. He had smashed Dankworth’s nose in with the crown of his head. Francis grinned and strode over to him, arm outstretched. Jamie looked flabbergasted at himself, but Francis patted him on the shoulders.

“There’s a lad,” he said. “Want to eat here or up above?”

Jamie shook his head, eyes unseeing. Francis told him to repair to their quarters, and he snatched two plates from Mr. Lowbridge’s hands and followed him up. 

James was staring at a bloody rag when Francis arrived. Francis set the plates down and plucked the rag from James’s hand and stood over him. He tipped his chin up to inspect his face.

“You’ll have a bruise on your forehead,” he said, “but no cuts of your own. You did well, lad.”

“He wouldn’t get out of my face,” Jamie said. His voice had a vague and bewildered quality to it. Francis sighed and sat in his berth. 

“He’ll think twice about bothering you, next time. You’re not just a target anymore.”

“It was easy,” Jamie said, as if Francis were not there at all. “It shouldn’t have been so easy. It was so easy, and I let it go on for so long…”

“Jamie. James. Look at me.” Francis laid a hand on Jamie’s arm, brought him forth from the daze in which he was mired. “You didn’t _let_ him do anything. Everything he did, everything the others did—those were their choices. _Letting_ had nothing to do with it.”

“I should have—I should have—” 

“Here now,” Francis said, and pulled the boy into his embrace. It was awkward and bony and gangly, the wrong angle, but Jamie melted into him and let out a whimper. He buried his face in Francis’s shoulder. “There’s a lad,” Francis said. “It’s all right. It’s all right now.”

Francis let him lie in his berth in the boneless aftermath, and he ate his dinner watching over him in silence. When Jamie was up for his own dinner, he sat up, hair vertical on one side, and ate ravenously and single-mindedly, as if he had been starving. There was no talk, not even about the wolf cubs.

Francis found he missed the jabber.

**1826, HMS _Hecla_**

_Hecla_ and _Fury_ were forced to winter in Port Bowen, Prince Regent Inlet. The Captain was beside himself. They were late and the ice vexed them at every turn. The last voyage had been so successful, and Parry himself so optimistic about finding the passage on this one, only to be thwarted by the gathering ice, the early temperature drop. 

In late January, scouts came upon a band of Netsilik. Captains Parry and Hoppner tasked Francis and _Fury_ surgeon Alexander McDonald with speaking with them, though Mr. McDonald’s Inuktitut was leaps and bounds better than Francis’s. 

The Netsilik were befuddled and made south-ward gestures when asked about passage. They were kind, however, and willing to share of their seal meat. After so long on tinned veal and salt pork, the fresh meat was as ambrosia on the tongue. 

Mr. McDonald eased Francis through a conversation in which the Netsilik agreed to join them on a hunting party with the purpose of felling several caribou for the crew to eat. The Netsilik were, by Francis’s insistence, invited as honored guests to any feast they may have. 

The captains put together a hunting party consisting of Francis, Commander Portree of HMS _Fury_ , Lieutenants Haughton and Forsyth, and Royal Marines Lewiston and Abernathy. The morning they set off with three Netsilik hunters, they were some hundred paces from the ships when they were arrested by rapid footfall crunching over the icy snow.

It was Jamie, wrapped into a ponderous ball with a rifle resting over his shoulder.

“Please, may I come?” he said. “I swear I’m a good shot. I can get rabbits and pheasants and foxes in a trice.”

“Go back to the ship, Jamie.”

“I’m light on my feet and quick with my aim, Mr. Crozier, you know I am!”

“I know your _stories_ , Jamie, now get on back to your ship’s duties.”

“My _stories?_ ”

“Who’s this young man then?” Commander Portee asked, all smiles. Jamie’s face arranged itself into agreeability and he stood up straight to face the commander.

“James Fitzjames, sir, ship’s boy of HMS _Hecla_. Ever so pleased to make your acquaintance.” He stuck his hand out. 

“He’s twelve, sir,” Francis said. Jamie sent him a sour look even as the commander shook his hand. 

“You’re a brave lad, to join an expedition like this at such an age,” Commander Portree said. “You have experience hunting?”

“Yes sir, all the time with my uncle and his friends.”

“And shooting a rifle of that caliber?”

“And bigger, sir, if I do say so myself.” 

Commander Portree gave a hearty laugh and slapped Francis on the back. 

“Oh, I like this one, Francis,” he said. “I say the little master is welcome. Sometimes it does a party well to have a smaller body among its ranks.”

_It’s too dangerous_ , Francis bit back. He could not be seen to be publicly disagreeing with his commanding officer. He settled for scowling at Jamie when he fell into step beside him, but Jamie ignored him, nose tipped up into the cold air like the silly little toff he was. _I’ll not haul you on the sledge_ he wanted to hiss, but he held himself back. Francis stomped forward, following the Netsilik’s lead, and put Jamie out of his mind. 

They headed southwest on the trail of caribou tracks. 

“Not long,” he gleaned from Tonraq, the Netsilik man to whom the others seemed to defer. Tonraq spoke slowly for Francis’s benefit, and mostly in simple nouns and verbs accompanied by clarifying gestures. He held up a hand, from which a single finger emerged in the low lamp light. “One day,” he said.

“One day,” Francis repeated in his tongue, and Tonraq smiled and dipped his head. Funny—that gesture was the same between their two cultures. 

They set up camp after they had walked for some hours. The Netsilik shared a tent, and Commander Portree shared one with Lieutenant Forsyth from Fury. The two Royal Marines bunked together, and Jamie fit like a sardine between Francis and Lieutenant Haughton, who was on _Hecla_ with them. They snuffed out their lamp and lay shivering in their sleep sacks. 

“How many do you think we’ll need to feed both crews?” Haughton asked when the air warmed sufficiently to stop his teeth rattling. 

“Depends on how big they are, I suppose,” Francis said, “and how much we want to preserve for later.”

“Four would suffice, I think,” Haughton said. “Two for each crew, one for a few days of fresh meals, and the other for preservation.”

“That seems prudent,” Francis said. “Surely the hides and bones will be useful in some way, as well.”

“And the antlers,” Jamie said. It was the first he’d spoken since tagging along this morning. Francis rolled his eyes. 

“Antlers are a kind of bone,” he said shortly.

“How pedantic of you, Mr. Crozier.”

“Go to sleep, Jamie.”

“You two are speaking over my head, how am I meant to go to sleep in such conditions!”

“Jamie! Apologize to Lieutenant Haughton!”

Jamie sighed noisily and turned on his side to face Lieutenant Haughton.

“I’m terribly sorry for Mr. Crozier, Lieutenant Haughton, you know how he has a temper.”

“Jamie!”

“You’re very cheeky for a boy who has been the recipient of a great deal of Mr. Crozier’s generosity,” Haughton said.

Jamie went silent. Francis’s heart swelled, but he could not bring himself to extend his hand in comfort. 

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant Haughton,” Jamie said, quiet. He turned over to face Francis, who could only make out the sad little moue of his mouth in the dark. “I’m sorry, Mr. Crozier. Please don’t roust me from your quarters.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Francis said, and Jamie covered his face. Francis sighed. “I only want you safe, lad. This hunting party—it’s not safe.”

“It’s safe enough for you,” he said, muffled.

“I’m a grown man, Jamie,” Francis said. “I know the risks and take them on myself.”

“I know what I’m doing!” Jamie said. 

“Jamie. Go to sleep.”

“They’ll never let me alone if you’re not on the ship with me,” Jamie whispered. “They’d be after me day and night.”

“Who, lad?” Haughton asked. 

“Just some other boys,” Jamie said, voice suddenly guarded. “They take the piss a bit.”

Francis chewed on a lip. He hadn’t thought of where it would leave him, for Francis to be off the ship. One lucky headshot in the middle of a crowded mess hall couldn’t compare to what would happen if a whole swarm of them came upon him at once, like a pack of wolves on prey. Francis wanted to swear at himself for the lack of foresight.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Haughton said. “You make your fingers hardlike, real pincers, and you grab ’em by the balls and twist. Anyone’d drop like a stone and no mistake.”

“I broke Dankworth’s nose last year,” Jamie said.

“There’s a lad,” Haughton said. 

“Are they after you again, Jamie?” Francis asked. “You should have told me.”

“I can’t hide behind you always,” Jamie said. Francis’s brow went up, and Jamie apparently did not require lamplight to see it. He wriggled in his spot. “Just—it would be best if you stayed on the ship with me from now on.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Francis said dryly, and Haughton snorted out a laugh.

“So we’re in agreement.”

“Take it up with Captain Parry when we get back, lad,” Francis said. “Go to sleep now.”

“I think I should like to shoot one of the caribou myself.”

“Jamie. Lieutenant Haughton needs his rest.”

“Sorry, Lieutenant Haughton. Do you think the marines will want to do all the shooting, or will I be given leave to do some of my own?”

“Jamie! Sleep!”

“Sorry, Mr. Crozier. Good night, Mr. Crozier.”

In what passed for morning in the long dark, Tonraq gave them a net and handed out spears to each man—and boy—from the expedition. They came upon the herd not an hour after setting out.

“We hunt males only,” Tonraq said. “Adults only. We will flank and separate those ones over there.” He pointed to a handful of caribou slightly offset from the rest of the herd. “We will go first, show you how to do it. Use the spears. Your _guns_ —” Here he approximated the English word, which sounded disdainful to Francis’s ear. “—are too loud, cause the herd to startle and panic. Dangerous.”

Francis conveyed the plan to the commander and the rest. They grumbled about the guns but agreed. The Royal Marines persisted in carrying theirs, much to Tonraq’s flat-mouthed disapproval, but the rest were packed away in the sledges.

The herd was some two hundred fifty or three hundred beasts, bigger than any deer in England or Ireland. Commander Portree estimated the males to average about four hundred pounds. They sat in the snow snorting and snuffling at rest. There were babies among their number—no longer infants, but obviously juveniles of the species, still vying for Mother’s attention. Tonraq told them this was but a fraction of the real number of caribou populating the area. The real herd, hundreds of thousands of animals deep, often broke off into their own smaller groups. 

“We avoid the big herd,” Tonraq said. “Less danger of trampling.”

If the party weren’t to go after the females, they would not need four kills, and would not be able to carry them besides. One big bull would suffice, even for preservation rations. Francis said as much to the rest of the party, and Tonraq said his plan was the same. Thus it was settled: a single bull for the Netsilik, and a single bull for the expedition. 

“This is so exciting,” Jamie whispered to Francis as they lay in wait for Tonraq’s signal. “I thought the shooting would be exciting but now we have spears! Like real Esquimaux!”

Lord, save him. Who did Jamie think Tonraq and company were?

“Hush, lad.”

“I wonder if it’s very hard. I should have practiced first. Oh, I hope I don’t embarrass myself.”

“Jamie.”

“Sorry, sir.”

They waited in silence, and Jamie fidgeted only a little. Finally, Tonraq raised a hand and made a cutting gesture. His compatriots fanned out, silent despite the layer of ice on the snow, and Francis marveled at their prowess. They flanked a big bull and threw a net over him. When he reared up in a panic, baying and snorting, Tonraq and the others threw their spears with deadly accuracy into his neck and chest. 

Other caribou scattered, galloping off every which way. Francis shoved Jamie behind himself in all the hullabaloo while the Netsilik slit the throat of their kill. Tonraq pointed at Francis and shouted. 

“Go now, with the net!”

Francis repeated the instruction, and Commander Portree and Lieutenant Forsyth tried, unsuccessfully, to throw their net over a passing bull. The beast tripped and fell and bellowed, a hoof knocking Forsyth in the leg. He choked off a scream and fell, and Francis darted forward to drag him away from the rest of the beast’s flailing limbs.

“Spear it!” Francis shouted. “For God’s sake, spear the fucking thing!”

Lewiston and Haughton’s spears struck the beast in the back but did nothing for the flailing. The commander’s spear glanced clean off, while Abernathy’s managed to strike a good blow in the neck. Jamie sprinted into the fray, spear raised far above his head.

“Careful, Jamie!” Francis shouted. “Not too close, lad!”

Forsyth was breathing hard, trying not to cry out. Francis held him fast, back against his chest. He would tend to the wound when he knew Jamie was safe. 

Jamie flung the spear down with all his might. It struck the beast’s eye and fell away. The caribou shrieked and only fought its confines harder.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Francis said. 

“Get the bloody guns,” Forsyth said through clenched teeth. 

“We’ll be trampled, Forsyth,” Francis said. “Give them a minute.”

The Netsilik appeared and did the work of killing the caribou for them. Francis slumped back in relief, and Forsyth sagged against him. There was a bit of shocked laughter and one whoop of triumph. Francis saw Commander Portree stretch out his hand. The Netsilik took it cautiously in turns, and the commander pumped away, oblivious to their bewilderment. 

Jamie ran to where Francis sat in the snow and skidded to a halt before throwing himself down beside him. 

“Did you see me?” he said. “I got his eye.”

“It was quite the blow, Jamie,” Francis said. “Here, take my place. I need to tend to Lieutenant Forsyth’s leg.”

Jamie’s eyes went big and he scrambled to prop himself behind the lieutenant. His bony arms locked tight around Forsyth’s chest. Francis pushed his slops up, only to be stymied by his trousers.

“Does it hurt very much, Lieutenant Forsyth?” he asked as Francis pulled a knife and cut the Lieutenant’s trousers open. 

“No, it’s a bloody feather pillow, Fitzjames, Jesus,” Forsyth gasped. 

“He’s a talker and no mistake,” Francis said. “Let it distract you. Jamie, tell him about the time you and William got away from your aunt and uncle in London.”

Jamie launched into the story with great bombast, and Forsyth looked pained, eyes squeezed shut, but he nodded and hummed at all the appropriate parts while Francis inspected his injury.

The wound was a big curved cut that bled messily, but no bone poked through. Some fat and tissue was exposed, and they would have to carry him back on a sledge, but he would keep the leg. 

“No fashionable peg leg for you, Lieutenant,” Francis said, and patted him on the hip. “Let’s get you on a sledge.”

One of Tonraq’s companions pulled the smallest sledge over to them. Francis and Haughton lifted Forsyth onto it and secured him, then covered him with sleep sacks. Francis rocked the sledge a bit.

“Is that all right?” he asked.

“Aye,” Forsyth said.

“You’re not going to fall out?”

“Crozier, my God, but you are a mother hen,” Forsyth said. The tone was harsh but the corners of his mouth curled up. “Does Fitzjames call you Mummy, I wonder?”

“You’re not so pitiful I won’t crack you one, Forsyth,” Francis said with a laugh. 

Francis left him to go help load the caribou onto the larger sledges. He bade Jamie to stay with Forsyth and fetch anything he needed. 

The caribou were easily more than four hundred pounds apiece and required four men to heft them up. After the second one was secured on its sledge, they all leaned against it, catching their breath. An approaching rumble and rapid ice crunch alerted them to the return of the herd.

Then Jamie’s scream rent the air.

Francis was on his feet in an instant, and around him he heard the Netsilik begin to shout and scramble for their weapons.

It wasn’t the herd heading at them at breakneck speed. Gnashing its teeth and roaring its fury, headed straight for Jamie and Forsyth, was an ice bear. 

Francis ran toward him, and distantly he was aware of the Netsilik ahead of him on either side, and the Englishmen behind him. Forsyth was shouting and wriggling, and then Jamie was rummaging for something behind him. Francis knew he was screaming Jamie’s name, but he couldn’t hear it above the pump and panic of his own heartbeat in his ears.

The ice bear was white and yellow, all claws and teeth. Its speed was nothing Francis could hope to match. It was at least seven feet long and some eight hundred pounds. They were done for. Francis was about to watch it knock his boy into the air and crush him under its jaws. He was about to watch James Fitzjames die. 

Suddenly Jamie crouched down behind Forsyth, rifle propped against the sledge’s edge. Francis was screaming his name. Jamie didn’t look back. He got off a shot that made the bear’s shoulder burst red over all the white. The bear reared back and roared, and Jamie got off another shot into its exposed chest. Blood poured out of the bear and made it halt long enough that Tonraq and his companions were able to rush it with their nets. When it fell, the earth and ice trembled, and the men around them cheered. The Netsilik finished it with their spears. Francis made it to Jamie’s side just as he fell bonelessly back into the snow. 

“Holy Christ!” Forsyth was chanting, blubbering, hysterical. “Oh fuck, Jesus Mary and Joseph!”

“Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” Francis said, hauling his body into his arms. “Jamie, say something, for God’s sake.”

Jamie was pale and shocky. He gripped Francis’s slops too tight in his hands. His eyes were big and glassy.

“I got him?” he asked.

“Aye, lad,” Francis said. “You did so well.”

“I think I should not like to hunt for a while,” he said. 

“No,” Francis laughed. “No, I think that’s enough of that for a good long time.”

The rest of the men came upon them to sing his praises and make sure Forsyth wasn’t dead of fright. It was decided that the ice bear, though it might be good meat, was too heavy to haul. The Netsilik skinned its back and offered the pelt to Jamie, who accepted it with his mouth agape despite the blood.

“Your boy will be a fine warrior,” Tonraq said. “Brave. Does not lose his wits.”

“Yes,” Francis said, swelling with pride. “Yes, he’s an asset to us.”

“But you did not want him on the hunt.”

“I had feared for him.”

“Our boys go on the hunt younger than him,” Tonraq said. “He will never be a man if you do not let him.”

Francis ruminated on the thought of Jamie as a man as they hauled their sledges back. Francis’s first mate, he’d said he wanted to be. But Francis dreamed of better things: Jamie the commander to his captain, finding the Northwest Passage at last, their portraits awarded pride of place at the Admiralty. Their names in the history books, forever. Crozier and Fitzjames. 

Yes. Jamie would be a great man. Francis had only to let him find his way.

There was much fanfare when they returned not only with a massive caribou bull but the bloody pelt of an ice bear. Commander Portree lifted Jamie up onto his shoulders and paraded him around to great cheering, while Jamie looked as bewildered as he was pleased. The story of his heroism spread through the crew like wildfire, uncontrollable and embellished, and soon Jamie was being toasted and fêted, spirits poured down his gullet like water.

Francis never thought to wrangle a drunken ship’s boy now that he was not one himself, but here he stood, helping a jangly collection of limbs into some sleep clothes, cooperative as a sackful of kittens.

“I shot the ice bear, Mr. Crozier,” Jamie said, his enunciation a shade too precise. His hair stood up every which way and he blinked slow and uneven. Francis smoothed the hair down on this crown. Jamie’s eyes slid shut and he leaned into Francis’s hands. 

“Yes you did,” Francis said. “You bought Tonraq enough time to take him down, lad. You were very good.” Francis put his hand in the empty shirtsleeve and fished about for Jamie’s arm, which wriggled away from him like a nervous eel.

“So you see,” Jamie said, swaying. 

“See what, Jamie.”

“They’ll have to like me now,” Jamie said.

Francis caught his wrist and held fast. He eased it through the sleeve and sighed. Jamie dropped his arm to his side as if it were dead weight.

“I’m sure they will, Jamie.”

Francis knew damn well that the other boys’ envy would only make things worse for him. A legend on his own ship, with an ice bear pelt besides? Francis could only hope a growth spurt would make him lanky and intimidating, and soon. And in that hope, Francis put little store.

“Up you get,” he said, and helped him into his hammock. He stopped the thing from swinging lest he be obliged to clean up the inevitable sick. 

Francis changed into his own sleep clothes and snuffed out the lamp. He watched the lump in the hammock until his own eyelids felt heavy.

“Mr. Crozier?” came the sleepy voice.

Francis grunted.

“You won’t tell anyone?”

“Tell anyone what, lad?”

“That I was so frightened,” Jamie whispered. “That I was scared nearly to death before I got the shot off.”

Francis’s heart swelled. He reached out a hand and groped about until he found what must have been a bony shoulder. He squeezed.

“No, I’ll never tell,” he said. 

“Promise?” Jamie’s voice was fading.

“Cross my heart, Jamie.”

“I looked into his eyes,” Jamie mumbled. “How like a man’s they looked.”

“Think of something happy,” Francis said, “and dream of nicer things.”

Jamie’s words slung together like drunken friends holding each other up at the end of the night.

“Had to save you,” he said. “’ll always save you.”

Francis hadn’t cried since his nan died more than ten years past. He wanted to cry now, but he pressed his lips together so as to stem the burn behind his eyes. When he slept, he dreamed of wolves that turned into crows that turned into the stars by which to steer his ship. 

By the summertime, _Fury_ had run afoul of a great mass of ice and had become hopelessly entrenched. For a month they pumped and dug, but the ice was a hungry thing, eager to crush this wooden interloper in its appetites. The command team spent over a month dithering behind closed doors. The orders finally came to unload stores, to make room for the _Fury_ crew on _Hecla_. 

The captains saw a lead open to the south, but their rations were strained, and they would have to turn back to England instead of venturing deeper into the cold. 

_Fury_ , bent and broken, was abandoned to the ice. Captain Hoppner stood at _Hecla_ ’s stern as they sailed away from _Fury_ , and no one approached him. 

Francis found Jamie at the starboard side, spyglass in hand. He, too, was watching _Fury_ diminish into the distance. Francis set his hands on Jamie’s shoulders. Jamie craned his neck back to look at him, but put his eye back into the lens for a last glimpse of their thwarted expedition.

“Never forget that’s what ice does,” Francis told him. “Never forget we are at its mercy here.”

Jamie set the spyglass down. For once, he had nothing to say. 


	2. Chapter 2

**1836, the steamship _Euphrates_**

James Fitzjames was freezing. 

James Fitzjames was burning and freezing at the same time. He shook with such violence it felt as though his brain were bouncing between the walls of his skull. His skin felt as though it were being flayed by a devil snapping a cat-o’nine-tails at him. He thought he would shake clear out of the skin tormenting him now.

James Fitzjames thought he was going to die.

He cried out when someone sponged the sweat from his brow. He thrashed when someone tried to take his blankets from him, his prized ice bear pelt. He sobbed when someone pressed a cool cloth to his face. 

“Malaria,” they murmured.

“His second bout with it.”

“When was the last?”

“Just last year.”

“He was so well yesterday. I thought him on the mend.”

“The fever does this. Plays with a body. Lulls it into believing it’s well again only to strike again.”

“Will he recover?”

“We can only pray.”

“Should we tell Captain Chesney?”

“Francis is a busy man. We’ll inform him if he takes a turn for the worst.”

 _Francis, Francis_. James knew a Francis or two. There was a Francis, when he was a child. There was a Francis in his letters. There was a Francis on a ship, on every ship. On this ship. 

Was James in the Arctic again? He was so cold. He must be on _Hecla_ , with Francis. They must be ensconced in ice. The seals were upon them. The caribou were upon them. The bears were upon them. 

“Francis!”

“Hush now. Save your strength.”

“Where is he? Where’s Francis?”

“You can see the captain when you’re well again.”

James saw nothing but flickering lamp light and blurred shapes. His eyes would not cooperate with him. His teeth were rattling in his head. He had never left the Arctic. _Fury_ was sinking, cracking. Slowly. The sea was hungry, but the sea took its time. Somerset Island. Baffin Island. Lancaster Sound. Port Bowen. He must feed them. They were so white, and so empty.

“I don’t know these places, James, I’m sorry.”

“Francis. Francis.”

Francis appeared before him, orange and yellow by the light of the fire. He smiled down at him as he wiped his face. 

“There now,” he said. “You rest. Do you think you can drink some broth?”

James nodded. He thought he nodded. 

“All right. Can you sit up a bit for me?”

He was dizzy but he got himself upright. He trembled at the touch of the cold. The blankets were scraping his skin, but he lashed them tight around himself. Where was his bear pelt? Where was his warmth? 

Francis put a bowl to his lips and he sipped. It was hot and salty and good. He nearly swooned. Francis told him how good he was, how brave. Francis held a bedpan for him. His face flamed but he did what needed to be done.

“There’s a lad,” Francis said. “Now go to sleep, James.”

He was going to die out here in the Arctic, but at least Francis Crozier was by his side.

**1837, Admiralty Banquet, London**

James was flushed and giddy with drink and pleasure. He had lost track of how many captains’ and commanders’ hands he’d shaken, exchanging congratulations. The Admiralty was festooned and gilded for the command promotion banquet, and as a newly minted lieutenant, James was among those honored tonight. 

Francis Crozier was here as well, somewhere. A commander now, though by rights he should be a captain. 

Abuzz, James kept sweeping his attention over the sea of revelers in an attempt to find the man. They had not been in the same room for years, but their correspondence was yet robust. James had been looking forward to their reunion with a gusto he knew he should seek to conceal, but his heart was too full to contain his excitement. 

There was much to discuss. Crozier’s subsequent Arctic voyages for one, his sojourn in Portugal for another. James’s own triumphs and mishaps in places that seemed like dreams even now. In their correspondence, James had been able to disclose particular uncertainties that would be unseemly to admit to anyone but Francis. Francis had ever been a safe haven to which James could bring his fear and doubt without recrimination. Ink and paper were lifelines to be sure, but they were no replacement for the succor of sharing space, laughing over a meal, listening to that lilting voice, long missed. He longed to see him in the flesh, longed to see his face animated by a story or by hearing a story—in truth, James longed to be assessed by that shrewd judge and found impressive. 

Of late, Crozier’s letters had acquired an acid quality James found challenging to interpret. While he had oft chuckled at the barbs against the crusty elders of the Admiralty, he was disquieted by the bald hatred he could glean in some of those jibes, and the deterioration of Francis’s handwriting from each letter’s beginning to its end. He put it up to his frustration with the Admiralty’s reluctance to promote him despite his unparalleled fitness as a sailor and magneteer. James understood too well the limits of a life lived outside the bounds of good English breeding, and he wanted badly for Crozier to find an answering refuge in him. 

He finally found Commander Crozier doing his level best to blend in with the plant life in the doorjamb of an anteroom. He was nursing a snifter of whiskey and neatly sidestepping idle conversation by inspecting, with great focus, the quality of the ficus leaves before him. 

James’s breath caught when he saw him looking hale and handsome in his dress uniform. Time had sapped some of the color from his hair and given his face more lines, but more than anything he looked strong and distinguished, his back straight, his shoulders broad, his body sturdy but trim. The picture of masculine seafaring confidence. James hoped the curl he had put in his hair was comely.

James’s heart flipped. He’d thought his affection for Francis Crozier a silly fixation of his youth long past, but the quailing of his lungs and the heat in his face told him the orientation of his heart was steadfast as ever. Francis Crozier: true north. How he would laugh if he ever knew. If he didn’t condemn James for his inversion. 

James approached Crozier with two flutes of bubbling champagne, and nudged him with an elbow. The famous eyebrow winged upward as he turned to see who dared harass him in his solitude. His eyes widened as they scanned James down and then back up, and his mouth guppied for a moment before breaking into a smile.

“My God, that can’t be James Fitzjames!” he said. The hand holding his whiskey came around and pressed his shoulder while he held the other out for James to shake. James beamed and set the flutes of champagne down before taking the proffered hand and pumping it with unseemly vigor.

“Congratulations are in order, _Commander_ Crozier,” James said, and Crozier huffed out a self-deprecating little laugh.

“And for you, Lieutenant Fitzjames,” he said, letting go of James’s hand. “As much for your achievements in height as your achievements in rank.” He sent him a wink that nearly gave James palpitations. “But please, call me Francis. We are old friends, aren’t we?”

James’s heart leapt. He felt silly, like a schoolgirl before a handsome soldier, but he could not keep the worshipful grin off his face.

“Francis,” he said, reverent. Francis chuckled again and patted his shoulder. James handed him a flute of champagne, which he accepted after setting his snifter down. “How is your family?” James asked. “Your sisters?”

“Oh, well, very well,” Francis said. He looked as transfixed as James felt. It could not be that he was as inclined to James as James was to him—unlike other men James had encountered in his naval career, he had never seen Francis’s eyes linger on another of his sex. He must be in shock over James’s growth from boy to man. His eyes were not even level with Francis’s shoulders the last time he had seen him. “Truth be told, I have so many nieces and nephews, I could neither name them all nor tell you who belonged to whom. Some are nearly my age and have grown children themselves!”

James laughed and ventured a clap on Francis’s arm. He felt warm, as fizzy as the drink in his hand.

“What of your family, Jamie? James. How are your aunt and uncle? William?”  
  
James felt the quality of his smile strain. He cleared his throat and steadied himself.

“Unfortunately, Uncle Robert passed last year,” he said. “Aunt Louisa and William were obliged to move from their home at Rose Hill.”

“Oh, James,” Francis said, expression collapsing into concern. He set his flute down and clasped James by both shoulders. “I’m so sorry.” 

James forced a smile out.

“And I’m sure you heard of all the trouble that came upon us on the _Euphrates_ ,” he said. “Rather an _annus horribilis_ , I’m afraid.” 

“I had heard the expedition was beset by misfortune,” Francis said. “And someone told me you had taken ill.”

“Malaria, yes,” said James. “I also broke my leg, was held hostage, and lost all my clothes, fifteen tons of coal, my chronometer and an entire ship.” He tried to smile, but Francis’s knitted brow filled him with the kind of grief unique to those moments when someone sees you, truly, and extends a hand in love. He swallowed past the gathering thickness at the base of his throat. James wished Francis would gather him close and squeeze until all the tension and worry bled from him. He remembered how it felt to be comforted by those arms. Would that he had been older. Would that Francis had an eye for the male of the species, full stop.

But Francis did not embrace him. He merely held him steady and gazed at him with unbearable sympathy. 

“You are well now,” Francis said. “With many dashing stories, I imagine.”

James laughed weakly. Francis dropped his hands and stepped away, much to James’s disappointment.

“I’d much rather hear your tales of derring-do,” James said. “You’ve been back to the Arctic a few times now. Bereft without my swinging away beside you, no doubt.”

Francis picked up his flute of champagne and tucked a smirk into its rim as he took a sip.

“Aye, I didn’t know what to do with myself without the ongoing narration.”

Christ, but James had been such a little fool. 

“I meant to come with,” he said, “but I had the chance to go to Brazil, and I found myself compelled to do so.”

“Funny, I remember you saying something about not seeking the warmer climates.”

“One does need variety in life,” James said. 

Francis glanced around and then leaned in close. James held his breath for he knew not what.

“Listen, James,” Francis said. “Are you promised to any particular voyage next?”

“Not as such,” James said. “I’m to start courses in gunnery and sciences aboard HMS _Excellent_ , but that is merely training.”

“I have it under good authority that Ross and I—that is, James Clark Ross and I—will be at the helm for an Antarctic expedition in the next year or two. Blanky will be there, as well—you remember I spoke of him.”

“Of course,” James said. “Thomas Blanky, Ice Master.” Bosom friend upon whom Francis had opined endlessly during their time together.

There was a pause, and then Francis straightened his spine and looked James steadily in the eyes.

“You should come with us. Round out our command team. Another polar veteran aboard is another disaster averted, that’s what I say.”

The thought of joining Francis on another voyage filled him with joy, but he knew he must contain himself. He schooled his expression into one of mild curiosity.

“I would be very interested indeed, Francis,” he said. “Do keep me updated.”

Francis peered at him suspiciously from under the incredulous brow. He stepped back and took a sip of the champagne. James felt suddenly wrong-footed. He wanted to ask if Francis thought there would be penguins, but he caught sight of Captain Edward Sparshott and his mouth flapped before his brain could stop it. 

“Ho there, Captain Sparshott!”

James cringed when Sparshott turned toward him with startled pique. But soon enough his expression cleared and he wandered over in no great hurry. He pursed his lips at James as if that were greeting enough.

Sparshott was an imposing man—tall with a ponderous belly and unruly blond hair slowly turning silver. James had served under him on HMS _Winchester_ , and he had been the one to promote him to first mate. He had a severe countenance that gave him the appearance of sneering when he spoke, but one became accustomed to the foible with time. Captain Sparshott had been fond of James, and his good will had eased the growth of his career. He had almost destroyed it himself by resigning his commission on the _Winchester_ to join the _Euphrates_ expedition, but he was a lieutenant now despite all ensuing disasters and hardly worse for wear. James shot him an easy smile.

“Captain Sparshott,’ he said. “Have you made the acquaintance of Commander Crozier? I was with him on Captain Parry’s third Arctic expedition.”

Francis and Sparshott eyed each other without extending hands.

“Yes, I am aware of Commander Crozier,” Sparshott said, lip curled. A glance at Francis revealed a stony expression and shuttered eyes. James’s smile felt as though it may crack. 

“He taught me everything I know about sailing and magnetism,” James said. “And Francis, Captain Sparshott here introduced me to the joy of Congreve rockets. I say, have you ever handled a Congreve yourself? You simply _must_ , Francis, or yours is a half-life, doomed to unfulfillment.” James laughed, but Francis only looked increasingly sour. He set down his champagne flute and took up his snifter of whiskey. James’s smile faded. 

“So you’ve finally wormed your way up the ranks, Crozier,” Sparshott said.

 _Heavens_ , James thought, heart sinking.

“I daresay I’ve earned my rank many times over, sir,” Francis said, voice tight. 

Sparshott’s lip curled up.

“A man of your country, your temperament, your breeding?” He snorted. “No doubt you’ve worked some Papist curse on one of the soft hearts among the rear admirals, but mark my words, Crozier, you will never have a command of your own.”

“I suppose time will tell, sir,” Francis said with an answering sneer.

Captain Sparshott turned his attention to James.

“I admit when you spoke so freely of your association with Mr. Crozier here, I thought to judge you harshly. Thank God you proved yourself a gentleman and a competent.”

“Er—thank you, Captain Sparshott. But I must say, Commander Crozier is one of the finest sailors I’ve ever had the pleasure—”

“What was that story you were always telling?” Sparshott’s smile was sly, his blue eyes glinting. He rubbed his chin theatrically and nearly bumped his belly into James’s. “Something about saving an entire hunting party from an ice bear with just your twelve-year old wits?”

“Erm.” _Dear God._

Sparshott’s smile dropped in the blink of an eye and he skewered Francis with a look of such hatred that it stole the breath from James’s lungs. 

“Tell me, Crozier, why did you think it appropriate to take a ship’s boy on a hunting party with a pack of savages?”

Francis’s jaw worked as he straightened himself and squared his shoulder. He set his hands down at his sides, one tightened to a fist, and tipped up his chin. 

“The Netsilik, sir, are as civilized as you or me.”

Sparshott snorted.

“Look at him, Fitzjames,” he said. “In his cups and spouting balderdash already.”

“That was not how I came to be on that hunting party, I assure you, Captain Sparshott,” James said. “In fact, remember, I insisted—”

“You’re lucky a _small child_ was there to pull your sodden arse out of that particular fire, Crozier.”

“Lieutenant Fitzjames behaved admirably in trying circumstances,” Francis ground out, “and I am grateful he was there.”

James groped for his memories of telling this story on the _Winchester_ , but they were scrambled by drink and repetition. Who knew which version Captain Sparshott had heard? There was one where James blew the bear’s head clean off in a single shot; there was one where the Netsilik begged him to use his white man’s weapons when their spears proved inadequate to the task; there was one where it was Francis he was protecting, Francis who was cowering, Francis who thanked the Almighty for James Fitzjames before the corpse of the fallen bear as the others cheered around him. James cringed and tried to rectify whatever bent truth was swirling about in Sparshott’s head. 

“I should mention it was actually Commander Portree who allowed it, sir, I mean, I suppose it’s Captain Portree now, but the fact remains—”

“You should be careful with whom you associate, Fitzjames,” Captain Sparshott said, turning abruptly from Francis to face James. His habitual sneer revealed one ragged canine tooth. “You’ll find that the company you keep may keep you instead.”

With that, Captain Sparshott pivoted and ambled away. James’s ears felt hot, and he ventured a glance at Francis. He was flushed, and knocked back all the whiskey in his glass, and all the champagne in his flute besides. 

“That man,” he growled, “kept me from promotion for _years_ , James. The company you keep, indeed.”

He stormed off in the direction of the bar. James tried to follow, but was waylaid by John Barrow and George Back. By the time he caught a glimpse of Francis again, he and James Clark Ross were sat by the fire, their heads bent close together as they spoke. James excused himself and made his way toward the fire. 

It was Ross who looked up and greeted him.

“Fitzjames!” he said, jovial as ever. “I hear you’ll be joining us for—” He tapped his nose and winked. “—our journey south.”

“Aye, and we’ll need him too,” Francis said, looking at the fire rather than at James. “Who else could possibly save us from ourselves should we encounter trouble?”

“Francis, I’m sorry for Sparshott,” James said. “You know how he is.”

“One hand tied behind your back the whole while, I’m sure!” Francis slammed his glass of whiskey down on a side table and seized upon James with blazing eyes. Ross sighed and slumped back in his chair. “What the devil were you telling them on the _Winchester_ , James?”

“It makes a damn good story, Francis. I’ll not apologize for that.”

Francis snorted. Sweat had broken out along his hairline. Something in James soured at the sight.

“Even better when you embellish it and give yourself a good shine,” Francis said. His smile was a sneer to match Sparshott’s. “Tell me, were Tonraq and the rest mere jesters in your story? I suppose you saved them too?”

“Francis, come now,” Ross said.

“No! No, I want to hear it from his mouth! Tell the story. My good friend James hasn’t heard your version yet.”

“I suppose he’s heard yours?” James demanded. “What’s that like? You tried to make sure I never had any fun, and were _put out_ when I proved myself useful? You’re alive to berate me today because of me, Francis! How soon you forget!”

Francis’s laughter was joyless and mocking. He shook his head and tipped back his snifter of whiskey. His throat worked as he swallowed, and James looked pointedly away.

“I find you much changed, Francis,” he said. “I cannot say I am not disappointed.”

“And I find you a braggart and a kiss-arse,” Francis said.

“Francis…” 

“No, please, Captain Ross,” James said. “I would hear his piece. Let him humiliate himself most thoroughly.”

Francis stood and tipped his face up to look James in the eye. James hadn’t noticed that he was taller than Francis now, and he felt a moment’s vertigo at the wrongness of it. Francis Crozier, smaller than him. For some definition of the word. 

“If I had known my young friend Jamie would turn out to be such an insufferable gasbag, I would not have plucked him from the clutches of his tormenters.”

James felt pierced through his very heart. In the corner of his eye, he saw Ross bow his head, but he wouldn’t give Francis the satisfaction of looking away. He forced a puff of air from his nose—his best approximation of a laugh at this moment. He felt as though his chest were cracking in twain.

“And my dear friend Mr. Crozier would never have said such a thing to me,” he said, voice tight. He clenched his jaw. “You’re going to have a terrible headache in the morning, Francis. Do take care.”

James turned to James Clark Ross, who looked sorrier than anything. He nodded, unable to trust any words issued from his throat, and took his leave.

He decided to walk to his lodgings. The night was crisp, and reminded him of better times.

**1843, Bombay Dockyard, India**

James sat on the pier, swinging his legs like a boy. There was something about the sunset over the Indian ocean. Orange and pink, glittering away in its reflection. Ships in repose. Gulls soaring and feinting, black against the vivid God-light. Salt on the air. James took a swig of his bottle of ale and tilted his face up to the sky, eyes sliding shut.

“Christ, but isn’t it abominably _hot_ here?” came the complaint of one of James’s lieutenants, a Michael Bisset new to India. “Even Syria wasn’t like this. How do you lot stand it?”

James tried to ignore him. The heat put him in mind of Brazil. A life he could have led. His other paths, his other selves. Would he have been happier, being nobody? Here he was, a commander of the Royal British Navy. Captain of his own ship and a fleet of loyal men who admired him. Still there was some greedy impulse within him that chanted, _more more more._ What could slake it?

Another lieutenant, Barnabas Lowell, answered Bisset.

“I find the climate refreshing. Why, I would lay a pound in your hand right now if it wasn’t raining in great sheets back home.”

“Sideways!” Dundy piped up. “So you can’t even employ an umbrella!” 

“And unlikely to stop for the next, oh, four months,” said Lowell. James heard the clinking of two bottles together. “Give me India any day of the week.”

“Until monsoon season,” Dundy said, and the lot of them broke into laughter and groans. 

“I like the monsoon,” James said suddenly. The chatter died down.“It puts one in mind of one’s place in the run of things. None can tame it, neither cleric nor scientist, king nor pauper. An awesome reminder of mankind’s humility.”

“Hmph,” grunted Bisset. “Easy to say when you stand at the helm of a great ship, poised to whisk you away. I think I’d rather be freezing my bollocks off with Captain Ross’s lot.” 

James barely stopped himself from glancing sharply at the man. He felt Dundy’s eyes on him.

“Antarctica, was it?” James said lightly. He took three good swallows of his ale. “I wonder if they’ve been any more successful there than with their disastrous attempts at the passage.”

“Ah, that’s right,” Bisset said. “Weren’t you on one of those, once upon a time?”

“Parry’s third and least successful expedition,” James said. “We lost a ship and had to turn back. We were barely gone a year, and certainly I saw no evidence of a passage. The whole endeavor is a fool’s errand.”

“But surely you saw great and exotic things.”

The familiar flush of pride wound up James’s spine. He straightened and tilted his chin up. 

“I may have seen a thing or two,” he said. He hated the ice bear story these days. It tasted bitter on his tongue, a reminder that he was himself a construction, a falsehood. But there were other stories: the wolf cubs, the breaking of the ice with dynamite, the slow, demoralizing crush of the _Fury_ itself.

“And with Francis Crozier, of all people,” Dundy said pointedly. James shot him a look, and he only raised his brows, the picture of innocence. 

“Ross’s second?” Lowell was leaning over to peer at James with far too much interest. “An Irishman, no? What’s he like?”

James took another draw of ale. The sun had been reduced to weak rays of orange reaching into the purpling skies. Once, on _Hecla_ , Francis had hustled him up to the deck to watch the horizon flash green and swallow the sun. When the last pale rays of sunlight faded away, they were plunged into the long night of Arctic winter. “Remember this,” Francis had said, and James had held onto it for the rest of the expedition.

“An exemplary sailor,” James said. “Brilliant with magnetism. A quick and analytic mind, paired with the ability to spring into action at a moment’s notice. A shrewd judge of character with a healthy sense of fairness and justice. Overdeveloped, perhaps, along with his determination. He was—” James cleared his throat. Knocked back the rest of his ale. “He was a man I would have followed to the ends of the earth. It’s a shame what he’s allowed himself to become.”

“Oh, is he a cad?” Lowell asked, eyes lit. “A gambler? A drunkard?”

“A man with regrets, at any rate,” Dundy said. James looked away. 

“A drunkard, surely,” Bisset said with a snort. He drank deeply from his own bottle. “All those Irish are so.”

“His—cups are deep,” James said. “All those great qualities I mentioned can turn into an albatross about a man’s neck under the proper pressure. Analysis becomes paranoia. Expertise becomes arrogance. Such assurance of one’s correctitude in all things leads to pride, to miscommunication. All that fair play he’s so determined to uphold becomes a bitterness at the world for being an imperfect marble, to blame for causing him to stumble. Under the bleary eye of the drink, his very good character sours him into a—a monster.” James pushed ruthlessly down on the tightness that locked around his throat. “He is no longer the man I knew. I pity Captain Ross, I really do. Who could envy him such a second?”

James threw his bottle into the water. He pitied himself that he had only the one to throw. He wanted to throw every bottle he’d ever seen. Whiskey and tumblers and cut crystal glasses—all into the ocean, and the drink with them. 

“The _Copernicus_ lads down the pub were saying they’d heard the Antarctic expedition was a roaring success,” Bisset said. “I even heard tell of Crozier escorting a Miss Jane Clark Ross on his arm in a quadrille, skirts and all.”

Lowell laughed. James’s heart took up residence in the heel of his boot.

“And I heard there were penguins on _Terror_!” Lowell said, shoving Bisset’s shoulder. Bisset tittered like a girl. “I think those boys at the pub were having you on.”

“Even so!” Bisset said. “Gin-soaked and joyless as the commander claims he is, I’d rather be with a sodden Irishman in the great frozen north than here sweating my bollocks off!”

“Crozier’s a whiskey man,” James said. He stood and stretched. His back popped like little fireworks. 

Bisset snorted and squinted up at him.

“Whatever he is, he’s having a grand old time in the south bloody pole. I’ve heard they’re going for another run at the passage. Perhaps I’ll put myself on the list.”

“Whatever you do,” James said, “make sure you’re under someone else’s command. Whoever the first is—that’s who you want.” He started walking backward. “I’m for bed,” he called. “I’ll see you all on _Clio_ in the morning.”

With that, he pivoted on the ball of his foot and made haste back to the dockyard inn. All this talk of drink. He could use a brandy. 

In his rooms, he shucked his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. He discarded his belt and kicked off his boots. He poured himself a glass of brandy, but when he lifted it to his mouth, the scent turned his stomach. He set the glass down, brandy sloshing over the rim and onto his fingers. He swore and shook his hand. Drops of brandy splattered the table, the wall, his own face and chest. With a huff, he dropped himself into a wingback chair before the empty fireplace. 

He had spoken nothing but the truth about Francis. He was a slave to the drink, and it had made him a cruel shadow of his former self. So why did James feel as though he had betrayed him—again? He had not seen nor corresponded with the man since that night at the Admiralty six years prior. James had achieved great things in the interim. Great things! Things Francis could never dream, flitting about the poles measuring magnetic fields all his life. Frowning at sextants. Estranging himself from the people who loved him.  
  
James knew the truth: it was he alone who was shunned from Francis’s presence. James Clark Ross still enjoyed his company. Thomas Blanky, as well, presumably. In this, James was finally exceptional. 

They were all laughing and being gay together down there without him. Dancing the quadrille, playing with penguins. James was thinking about getting something shocking and avant garde himself. A tarsier, perhaps, or a cheetah. Something good for a ship. Something other men would envy. Something that would raise that bloody razor of an eyebrow.

There came a familiar knock at the door. Dundy. James sighed.

“Come,” he called. He slouched into the chair and refused to look up as Dundy entered and closed the door behind him. 

“What was that display, then?” Dundy asked, and slung himself into the neighboring chair, kicking his legs up to dangle jauntily over the arm.

“I poured myself a drink but can’t stomach it,” James said. He flung a hand in its direction. “You should help yourself.”

“Hell’s bells, James,” Dundy said. “Are you ever going to lift yourself from the devouring pit known as Francis bloody Crozier?”

“I will remind you that I am your superior officer, Le Vesconte,” James said. He sounded peevish even to himself—liable to stamp his foot and pout until given a lolly. He slouched further into the chair. His arse nearly edged off.

“You’re lucky those men haven’t been subjected to years of ‘Francis Crozier this’ and ‘Francis Crozier that,’ and then years more of ‘how dare Francis Crozier’ and ‘can you believe the cheek of Francis Crozier.’ But I see you, James Fitzjames.”

James tipped himself downward until he could plant his feet on the floor and sit up. He set his elbows on his knees and his face on the knot of his hands. He saw Dundy in the periphery of his vision alone. 

“It should be me on that expedition,” he said. “Me with the circumnavigation records. Me with the icebergs and straits named after me. Me with the penguins.”

“You on Francis Crozier’s arm during a benjo?” Dundy said lightly.

James threw himself backward in the chair and pinned his gaze on the ceiling. A splotch of wet had stained it from above, and there were cobwebs in the corners.

“Me on the next expedition to the passage,” he said, quiet. “I’m putting my name on that manifest, Dundy.”

“Perhaps I should join you,” Dundy said. “Keep you out of trouble.”

James ventured a glance at him. He was sitting up properly now, but when his gaze proved too bald, James averted his eyes to the cold fireplace.

“Please yourself,” he said. “The polar climes are challenging. Physically and mentally.”

“Do not play at nonchalance, James,” Dundy said, voice suddenly sharp. “Not with me.”

James closed his eyes.

“What would you have me say, Henry?”

“I would have you renounce your devotion to a man who is, by your own account, a sinking ship!”

“I am not… _devoted_ to Francis.”

“Dear God, it’s worse than I thought.” Dundy stood and made his way to the brandy after all. He sat back down and leaned on his knees, neck craned as if to force himself into James’s line of vision. James met his eyes begrudgingly. “James,” he said, so gently as to cause James physical pain. “That man will drag you down with him if you don’t have your wits about you. Why are you so intent on using him to punish yourself?”

“I need to know,” James said. 

“What do you need to know?”

“If he’s still in there,” he whispered. “If I can drag him back out into the light.” 

Dundy sighed and sat back. He swirled the brandy and brought it to his lips. He breathed deep before taking a sip.

“You are not obligated to save him from himself, James,” he said. “That is not your job.” 

“There is no obligation,” James said, suddenly fervent. “If I were drowning, Henry, would you not dive into the sea for love of me?”

“Of course I would,” Dundy said. He set the glass of brandy down and surged forward to grasp James’s hands in his. A wave of grey-streaked hair fell into his eyes. “Without hesitation, James, you know that. I cannot fathom why it would be the same between you and that old lushington.”

James pulled out of his grip and crossed his arms over his chest. The fireplace was suddenly fascinating once more.

“Not five minutes ago you said you saw me,” he said, “but apparently you haven’t listened to a word I’ve ever said.”

Dundy reared back as if slapped. His jaw churned under eyes wide with astonishment. James rolled his shoulders into himself. He found his tongue unable to work itself into the shape of an apology. He bit the inside of his cheek. The moment stretched between them, strained by the heaviness in the air. 

“Ice bear or not, Francis was the only reason I survived that voyage, Henry,” James said when the silence became unbearable. “Savior, teacher, brother. How could I be anything but devoted?”

“He publicly denounced you,” Dundy said. “He called you unforgivable things. He wished you away from himself. Why should he not lie in the bed he made?”

“And what of the bed I made?” James demanded. “I impugned his character, whether I meant to or not. I brought one of _his_ tormenters to his door, and could not even defend him properly. Perhaps I deserve this estrangement, Dundy, but I’ll be damned if I let him go off again into the great white dark without me at his back!”

“He’ll have Ross, as ever,” Dundy said. “He’ll not be friendless, James, though God only knows how.”

“Then my watchful eye will be stationed at a distance,” James said. “I made a promise, to myself if not to him, and I’ve been doing a piss-poor job of keeping it these last fifteen years.”

Dundy’s expression had taken on a thoughtful depth. He regarded James with shuttered eyes.

“Your devotion is a glory to behold,” he said after another silence. “Would that it were oriented to a more worthy subject. One who could return your faithfulness.” 

Dundy stood and drained the glass of brandy before walking to the door in three long strides. James’s heart rabbited through his innards. He leapt to his feet.

“Henry, I—”

“It is late,” Dundy said. He stood tall and met James’s eyes without even the ghost of a smile on his lips. “You ought to get some rest, James. We’ve an early morning tomorrow, and we can’t have our captain in a brown study.”

Dundy left, and the quiet slide of the door into its jamb might as well have been thunder. James sank into the chair and buried his face in his hands. 

Tomorrow he would step onto the deck of HMS _Clio_ looking dashing in a crisply-pressed dress uniform with not a curl out of place. He would be refreshed and jovial without even the hint of sweat-shine on his forehead. He would tell his men they were the pride of Her Majesty’s navy, the beating heart of England herself. He would have them cheering as he predicted their acts of valor and heroism. He would point his ship southeast and let the sails and drive her into all the glory to come. 

But tonight he was merely a man like any other. A man who counted his regrets, starting with his own braggadocio. His own constant heart. His own fell ambition. 

He snuffed the lantern and undressed. The room—India entire—was too warm to justify crawling beneath the bedclothes. He closed his eyes against the lamplight that washed in through the window. _Somewhere in Antarctica,_ he thought, _Francis is bundled up warm while his breath plumes out of him in great streams. He’s laughing at some jape of Ross’s, or making Blanky slap his knee and gasp for air. He is thinking of me not at all._

James dreamt of blue icebergs and a terrible bear moving British sailors about a chess board. The images would be dashed from his mind by sunrise. 

**1845, Admiralty Banquet, London**

James’s first thought upon seeing Francis far down the banquet table was that he had no business looking so striking. His hair had lost its vibrancy and his face was lined. Weight had settled over him in a manner that made him seem solid and powerful rather than bulky. Was he not nearly fifty by now? He should look avuncular and sexless, like Sir John. James was annoyed. He resolved to ignore Francis as thoroughly as Francis was ignoring him. He had seen Graham Gore about, and Dundy was nearby, surely. He had even seen Charles Des Voeux on the manifest. 

Yes, he would avoid Francis entirely. Perhaps once they were on a ship together again, he would thaw, but tonight he was taciturn and brooding, eyes half lidded with a drink in his hand. Best to make merry far from him, though James wanted nothing more than to be greeted with a hearty smile and a vigorous handshake.

After dinner, James sought out the newly minted _Sir_ James Clark Ross to congratulate him on his recent nuptials. His wife wore the finest silk and lace. James kissed Lady Ross’s hand.

“You look a vision, madame,” he said, and she laughed. Ross looked at her with his whole heart in his eyes. James felt a pang at the sight of it. He knew that despite the expansive workings of his imagination, his inversion excluded him from the tenderer emotions others reveled in so freely. Any love he fancied himself in was by definition a lie, a trick of the inverted mind, though it sickened him to label it as such. Try as he might, he could not be any other way. 

“You are an inveterate charmer, Commander Fitzjames,” Lady Ross said. “Might we attend your wedding, when you return?”

“Oh, I’m quite sure none of the fairer sex would have me,” James said with a mock frown, hand pressed to his chest. The Rosses both tittered.

“Now I know that’s not true,” Ross said, clapping him on the back. “‘The handsomest man in the royal navy,’ that’s what I’ve heard you called. Why, I’d lay odds we could find you a bride this very night!”

James’s face strained with the quality of his smile.

“A sorry task for such a venerable pair!” he said. “Ask any passing lady here, and she will tell you: James Fitzjames is a poor prospect.”

“In love with the sea!” Ross said. “Don’t worry, old chap. Even that fades with the love of a good woman.” 

Sir James and Lady Ross paused for a moment to make cow eyes at each other, but sure enough, Lady Ross seized upon the proverbial passing lady, and linked arms with her. She whispered into the lady’s ear and they both pinned him with impish, assessing eyes. The woman in question was lithe and delicate, effortless in her grace and beauty. She wore no wedding ring. 

“This is Sophia Cracroft,” Lady Ross said. “Sophia, Commander Fitzjames will be on _Erebus_ under your uncle’s command. Now tell me: how do you find our good commander tonight?”

James forced out a chuckle and stood at attention. He schooled his face into the kind of expression that landed great men’s portraits on these very walls. Dashing, he hoped, and confident.

“Oh, far too tall for one,” Miss Cracroft said with a smirk. “And so well-formed in full dress as to cause any poor gentlewoman to swoon. Eyes too lovely by half and smile too welcoming. It just won’t do, Commander Fitzjames. I’m afraid you’re doomed to wander all of Christendom unmatched.”

“A tragedy, truly,” James said, half bowing with a flourish. The women giggled and Ross’s hand came down again on his shoulder.

“There won’t be much in the way of feminine company in the Arctic,” Ross said. “Our Fitzjames will simply have to try his hand at courtship when he gets back.” He nudged him with an elbow and sent him a wink. “And maybe then we’ll be talking to _Sir_ James Fitzjames, eh?”

“I have no ambitions in that direction,” James lied, waving an insouciant hand. “But Captain Crozier should receive such an honor upon our return, at the very least.” Miss Cracroft’s smile faltered, as did the Rosses’. _Christ_. Which foot had James lodged into his gullet this time?

“Yes, well,” Ross said. “Certainly the man deserves that much and more. Did you know he dove into the freezing waters of the Antarctic to save a petty office who’d lost his footing? I promoted him to Captain that very day.”

Of course, Francis would do that. A man of action, who could perform a calculation of risk in a fraction of a second. A man who would not leave another behind if he could help it. How James longed to meet that man again.

“Francis is…a valiant man,” James said. Miss Cracroft looked pained. She lifted a glass of wine to her lips and swept her gaze away from their little conversation. 

“The Admiralty is too much with the old guard,” Ross said, leaning in and pitching his voice low. “Rigid and foolish, truth be told. They can’t see that times are changing. We are in a modern world, now. Find that thrice-damned passage, Fitzjames. You, Sir John, Francis—you’ll all be able to write your own tickets.” 

Miss Cracroft leaned in to murmur her leave into Lady Ross’s ear. Lady Ross squeezed her hand, Miss Cracroft nodded at Ross and James, and then she was gone.

“Oh dear,” Ross said. “I’m afraid that was ungallant of us, Fitzjames.”

“I meant no offense, Sir James,” James said. “Pray, how can I rectify matters with Miss Cracroft?”

“Peace, Fitzjames,” Ross said, patting his shoulder. “It is Francis who is the sore subject for her. You were not to know.”

“Francis,” James echoed faintly. “And Miss Cracroft.” His mind seemed to blank itself around the kernel of Francis, in love with this picture of feminine elegance. “They are…”

“They were,” Ross said, and dropped his hand from James’s back. He drew himself tall and smoothed down his uniform jacket. “But don’t let’s gossip. My Ann and I have never been to China. Won’t you regale us with tales of the Orient?”

A phantom pain in James’s arm and chest twinged. He had just the tale. 

Wine and champagne loosened James’s limbs as the night wore on. He felt carefree and optimistic. They would find the passage on this voyage. Sir John would pump the men up while Francis would ferret the passage out and thread the ships through it like the finest thread through a needle’s eye. Francis would come around when he saw how good James was with magnetism now. In the bosom of their friendship, Francis would not lean so heavily on the drink. Perhaps he would even come to confide in James about Miss Cracroft. And James would say, “Oh Francis, if she cannot appreciate you as you are, you must simply find someone who can.” 

James very deliberately refused to follow that line of thought to its inevitable conclusion, nor the familiar old thread in which he was a reedy ship’s boy glimpsing the Arctic through a spyglass for the first time with Francis behind him. Touching him. 

He was in polite company. There would be time enough later tonight for such meanderings in the privacy of his own rooms. He went off in search of someone fun to talk to.

“So there I am off the coast of Namibia,” he said to a rapt Gore, a put-upon Dundy, an amused Hodgson and a hang-dog Little, “one foot on my rowboat, the other on this unbelievable pile of guano, when suddenly there’s a rifle in my face and an irate Spaniard on the other end. ‘I say,’ I said, ‘would you happen to know the time?’”

All the lieutenants but Dundy laughed uproariously and James joined them. It was then that he noticed Francis was standing some five paces away, looking more melancholy than severe as he listened to their conversation. James’s mouth got away from him at the sight of it, and his arms too. He threw them open and called out to him.

“Francis! Come, come. Tell us about your penguins.”

Francis stepped reluctantly into the circle, wedging himself into the space between the _Terror_ lieutenants. Little had been with him on the Ross expedition, but Hodgson was new to his command. 

“They are malodorous and disagreeable,” Francis said, mouth twisting in a facsimile of a smile. “Nothing so thrilling as being mauled by a cheetah, nor riding a camel through Lebanon, nor winning any number of rocket battles, I’m afraid.”

James laughed heartily and slapped the back of the man next to him, who happened to be Dundy. Dundy flattened his lips at him. James slung an arm about him and squeezed. Dundy glanced at Francis and then back to James, clenching his jaw. 

“Oh, you’re sweet to think of me, Dundy, but it’s nothing,” he said. “A bit of fun.”

His long acquaintance with Dundy allowed James to glean the shuttering of his eyes, the barest flare of his nostrils. 

“Dundy—”

“Excuse me,” Dundy said, and ducked James’s arm to make haste away. James shrugged helplessly and took another sip of wine.

“I hope you have not indulged yourself too long in the warmer climes,” Francis said. “It would not do for you to have forgotten the lessons of the frozen north.”

“Oh Francis, never fear,” James spread his hands. “How could I ever forget you!” Laughter pealed out of him again. Francis was staring at him with sad eyes under that arched brow. Little hunched into himself and wandered aimlessly away. Gore and Hodgson were suddenly huddled close to the wall, discussing Arctic tides in great detail. James drained his wine glass as Francis stepped closer to him and put himself between James and the lieutenants.

“Perhaps you’ve had enough, James,” Francis said, voice low. The accent sent a thrill up James’s spine even as his dignity was affronted. “I can escort you back to your rooms, if you require it.”

“Just like old times, eh?” James said. “And that’s rich, coming from you. How many have you had tonight, hm?”

“I’m not the one who’ll be obliged to send a letter of apology to my friend and subordinate after the pounding in my head has abated tomorrow.”

“Dundy?” James said, letting himself be led through the corridors. “He’s fine. Doesn’t like you much.”

Francis audibly sighed. 

“Oop!” James said, and giggled. 

“Where are you staying, James?”

“At the Ramsey in Mayfair. You know the place?”

“Of course you’re in Mayfair,” Francis said. “Eager to be rid of your half pay, are you?”

“Francis, you have no sense of luxury,” James said. A coat was laid upon his shoulders and he was being bundled into a hansom. “If you’re not careful, you will look back on your life and realize all the frugality and austerity of your days never got you anything but fewer stories and less delight!”

Francis sat opposite him in the cab and it pulled forward into the street. 

“You’re my financial advisor now?”

James laughed and nudged Francis with his boot. He could still see the quirk of that colorless brow in the low light. It was the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. Oh, but he was a fool. 

“I know the truth about you, Francis Crozier,” James said conspiratorially. Francis said nothing, but the brow hiked higher. James leaned in and whispered, though it sounded much louder than he had intended. “You seized any opportunity to leave a social gathering early, even if it meant accompanying a man you despise.”

Francis issued another long sigh. He cast his gaze out the window at the passing street. 

“I don’t despise you,” he said, quiet. 

James laughed too loudly. 

“Sometimes I wonder if you’ve always despised me,” James said. “If it was all a game to you back then, a jape. Perhaps you were making sport of me amongst your friends, and there I was, eager as a pup, hanging on your every word. It must have been terribly funny.” He laughed again, but despair limned its edges now.

Francis was looking at him. James let his laughter die down. He swept a curl away from his forehead and tilted his chin up.

“Wonder what you like,” Francis said. “You do seem keen to believe the worst of me. The idea that I would keep your company for more than a year for some passing amusement is somehow the least generous, most unkind fantasy of yours yet. Christ, James. You invented that one whole cloth.” He shook his head and averted his gaze once again.

James tucked his chin into his chest and crossed his arms. 

“You stopped writing me,” he said. “What was I to think?”

“Perhaps that you owed me an apology!” Francis said, eyes flashing. “Perhaps that you were foolish and arrogant and insulted me most grievously!”

“And did you not insult me?” James demanded. “Did you not say you should have left me to those—those _wolves_? You knew what they did to me! You knew!”

“Christ,” Francis muttered. He passed a hand over his craggy face. “But I didn’t leave you to them, did I? I kept you, a stinky, chatty, wiggling ship’s boy, in my sardine tin quarters, for the entire expedition. What does it matter what I said in anger, some ten years later?”

James’s head felt fizzy. He laid his head against the wall of the cab, but the irregular bump and rock of their onward progress sloshed his brain and his stomach. He forced himself to unfurl and sit up. 

“Why are you doing this for me, Francis?” he said. “You could have just—” He flapped a hand around. “—left me in a heap in the coat closet. Gone back to your James Clark Ross.”

“Call it force of habit,” Francis said. 

At the Ramsey Francis let James hang on him until they reached his rooms. Francis smelled good, like a memory of warmth and safety plucked from some deeper consciousness. It put James at ease. 

Francis deposited him in bed and then hung James’s coat and jacket up in the closet while James tried to commit the sight of him puttering about these rooms to memory. He wrestled James’s shirt off him while James lay floppy and uncooperative, but left his linen undershirt. He took off James’s belt and unbuttoned his trousers but left them on. He pulled off James’s boots and set them by the door, and peeled his socks away, too. James stretched his toes, feeling strangely exposed by their nakedness, but Francis seemed to notice not at all. He wandered about the room as James lay there watching him blearily. He even set a glass of water by his bedside table. 

Distantly, James was aware that he should wish to kick himself later for not savoring every moment of this—of Francis’s sure hands on him, of Francis putting him to rights, of Francis making sure he was ready for a morning that might be more trying than anticipated. Finally Francis put out the lamp and slipped out the door without even imploring him to sleep.

When he woke in the morning, James found his fountain pen and ink pot out at his desk, and his stationery set straight and even between them.

He sighed. He supposed he did owe Dundy an apology after all. 

Not a week later, James was back at the Admiralty with Sir John and Francis for what was termed a final logistical meeting but seemed in practice another chance for Sir John Ross and the rear admirals to take turns praising and quizzing them like children.

Francis brooded through the pleasantries and platitudes while James made his jokes and flattered the old guard. Whenever James caught Francis’s eye, Francis held his gaze for long, fathomless moments in which James could not divine what he was thinking. 

When the meeting was over at last, James ducked into the privy to splash water on his face. He leaned his hands on the porcelain sink and looked at himself in the mirror. He clenched his jaw. 

He straightened and ran a hand through his hair, dislodging a curl from where it swung stubbornly in one eye. He stood tall and pulled his uniform jacket down so it hung straight along his body. He righted the fringe of his epaulettes. 

He looked good. He looked ridiculous. He took a deep breath. Perhaps he should find Francis—the man had a way of distilling him into the foundational parts of himself. Francis would say some cutting thing and make James real again. 

James shook himself and measured his breath, out and in. Out. In.

They were going to find the Northwest Passage. He and Francis. 

He left the water closet and rounded the corner back to the luncheon room. Amid all the gilding he saw Sir John Ross grab Sir John Franklin by the jacket and haul him close as he loomed over him. James halted in an instant and concealed himself behind a great column. 

“I have followed every Admiralty protocol,” James heard Sir John say in a tight voice.

“There’ll be nothing. You hear?” Ross said. “Nothing lives there. Nothing grows. You’ll eat your shoes again. You’ll eat worse.”

James wondered if he should intervene. Jocular and oblivious, he could bluster in and flatter the old man. Save his captain. 

But Sir John was a proud man. It was one of his failings, if James were being honest, and occasionally, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he liked to be. Sir John may not appreciate James’s performance, even if it was for his benefit. _Especially_ if it was for his benefit. James stood rooted to his spot.

“Death is slow in the Great White Nothing,” Ross went on, “and a hundred thirty-four starved men will turn devil against you, starting with the ones you hold closest.”

James’s blood rushed in his ears. 

Sir John wrenched himself from Ross’s grip and stumbled back. James slid further behind the column and did not see where Sir John disappeared to. When he emerged, he found Ross leaning his hands against the railing and surveying all the floors below with a wild look about him.

“Sir?” James said as he approached. He came at him slowly, sideways, as though he were an unbroken horse liable to be spooked. “Sir John?”

“What is it, Fitzjames,” Sir John Ross said, gruff. He did not look up from his inspection of everyone below. 

“I have—I have been to the Arctic.”

Ross scoffed and spat on the floor beside him.

“A baby bird, flying under the wings of more experienced sailors,” Sir John Ross said. “Might as well call yourself a tourist.”

“Yes,” James said. He ground his teeth together but forged on. “Yes, I know that. But I remember the _Fury_ , you see. Sir John has never seen the ice eat a proud ship built to withstand all manner of conditions. That’s a particular horror reserved only for people like us.”

Finally Ross peered at him through a suspicious squint.

“What are you on about, Fitzjames?” he said.

James glanced around and stepped close to the old man. He leaned in.

“Send rescue if you’ve not heard from us by the end of next year,” he said, low. “Do not tell Sir John. Do not tell Captain Crozier. But please, sir—send someone after us. Let us not flounder and the Admiralty lose face for one man’s pride.”

Ross stared at him for a long while before he pushed off the railing and stood to his full height, too close to James for comfort. James held steady. Ross was nearly a head taller than him, and fiercer in his quiet than James had ever known a man to be. His blood rollicked through him, but he forced his breath to remain even.

“I should leave him to his fate, the jumped-up mite,” Ross said. “And you and Crozier with him. But the men don’t deserve that. All those souls. Just boys, the lot of you.” He stuck a hand out in the narrow space between them, and James gripped it. It was a big hand, hard and calloused, more oar than flesh. They shook, and Ross stepped back. He regarded James with a hint of respect in his eyes. “You’ll have your rescue, Fitzjames, if I have to go fish you from the ice myself.”

With that, Sir John Ross turned and walked away. He did not look back. 

James let his breath leave him in a great gust. He leaned back against the railing. He closed his eyes, and behind them _Fury_ ’s stern rose high above the ice.

He could hear her cracking, even now.


	3. Chapter 3

**1846, Franklin Expedition**

It was funny—at this late date, after all he’d seen and all the disappointments he’d endured in the vast dismay of his life, Francis would have thought there was no hope in him left to dash. He would have thought the sensation so familiar as to be passé, tedious, beneath his notice. But here he was, heart sinking even as bile rose.

“Go for broke,” he’d said, Blanky stalwart at his side. “Join us on _Terror_ ,” he’d said. “Sail west ’round King William Land,” he’d said. “Survive.”

And Sir John, of course, would hear no such thing. His precious, lame ship—his damnable _pride_ —were dearer to him than the lives of his men. That his own fate was tied to theirs seemed not to occur to him. 

Hope, that tenacious wee thing that lived in Francis’s pulse no matter how beaten he thought it was, fluttered again when James, with a barely concealed wince, threw his opinion into the ring.

“Actually, Sir John,” he said, “I wonder if Francis has the right of it this time.”

In tandem, Francis and Blanky shifted their attention to James, who kept his gaze pointedly trained on Sir John as he reiterated what Francis had said. Valiantly Francis kept his mouth from falling open. James had been at his foppish, sneering worst thus far on the expedition—long-winded, puffing himself up, by turns sullen and bombastic, being perfectly ridiculous about his hair of all things, and always eager to remove himself from Francis’s company whenever it happened they might be left alone.

Sir John floundered for an answer that wouldn’t seem as though he were knocking back his protégé, though the end result was the same. 

“I fully believe God and winter will see us though, James,” he said, and with that, the lot of them were dismissed. 

Francis passed a weary hand over his face and peered at Blanky. The barest twitch of his brows told Francis their thoughts were one in the same: might they have an ally in James? An unlikely one, to be sure, but perhaps the only man on either ship who could turn flattery into action. James could use his honeyed words to bring Sir John round to their way of thinking.

“You know the man, don’t you?” Blanky asked when they were ensconced back in the great cabin on _Terror_. “Properly, I mean. Y’should confer with him, devise a way of convincing Sir John. And quickly.”

“I knew a boy who is long gone, Thomas,” Francis said. “It was nothing, and no use besides. James will do whatever he will do, and in fact, the further I am from such a thing, the likelier he is to perform.” 

“I’ve never understood the nature of your falling out.”

“I should think it obvious,” Francis said. 

“Frank, old cock, it is not.”

Francis huffed and sipped his glass of whiskey.

“I am an Irishman of low birth and neither fortune nor good name, doomed to be but a thorn in the Admiralty’s side,” he said. “James is—” He wave a hand about his head, like a carefully coiffed crown of ringlets. “—well-bred and well-connected, with the right accent and the right family. He’s a rich boy who happened to fall in love with the sea. I’m shocked we ever got on at all. Put it down to youthful naïveté—on both our parts.”

Blanky grunted—acknowledgement or understanding, Francis could not parse. Probably a chastisement, now that Francis thought on it. He sighed.

“Speak your mind, Thomas. I know you’ve an itch.”

“If it was nothing—a difference in personality, a simple growing apart—seems as though the two o’you wouldn’t be so damnably angry at each other.”

Francis grunted, feeling mutinous. He wanted to sink into this glass of whiskey and think all his black and swirling thoughts without being harassed into being _reasonable_ about it all. 

“Do you not find him the most insufferable man you’ve ever met?” Francis groused. “I cannot be the only one.”

Blanky snorted and slapped Francis on the back.

“Come on, boyo,” he said. “I’ve met Sir Johns Ross _and_ Franklin.”

A laugh bubbled up from Francis’s gut unbidden. He laughed harder, the sound reverberating between the creaking timbers of the great cabin. Blanky was chuckling in that low hiss he had, looking at him sideways. Francis’s mirth faded and he hid his face in another draw of his drink. 

How had it got so late? Francis felt old. His dalliance with Blanky—references to which were few and far between, and always in jest these days—was decades past, and when he took stock of himself, he was shocked to find Blanky and Sophia the only regular lovers he’d had all his long life. With Blanky, it was a bit of fun, and with Sophia what should have been joyous had become a tangle of thorns that tightened around his heart and lungs with every conversation until he winged himself away from her on a passing breeze and a fool’s errand. 

He had fancied himself in love with James Clark Ross once, and Sophia for years—but perhaps his character was as malformed as the bodies of stillborn calves, unsuited for the beating heart and happy work of love. Perhaps in being essentially unloveable, his own ability to love was damaged beyond utility. He might die in the great frozen maw of the indifferent Earth, as unloved a waste as the ice itself. Who would miss him? What was a life without love? 

Blanky’s sharp finger poked him in the arm.

“Don’t go too deep there, old man,” he said. “I’m sitting right here, mind.”

Francis roused himself, shook his head and sat up straight. He held up the cut crystal decanter in offer.

“Do you want another dram, Thomas?” 

Blanky held up his glass, two fingers of whiskey still sloshing about. 

“M’fine, Frank.”

“Mm.” Francis poured himself another couple fingers. “Anyway,” he said after a healthy sip, “what do you think James is playing at? Is he sincere? Is it some manner of jape?”

Blanky sat back and squinted at him. 

“I think he’s playing at getting out of this thing alive, same as you or me.”

Francis snorted and brushed the hair back from his forehead.

“He’d rather pitch himself headlong into the ocean than side with the likes of me, Thomas,” he said. “No, there’s some angle he’s playing.”

“No schemes in schemes here, Frank,” Blanky said. “Didn’t you say he was with you when you had to leave _Fury_? He had the look of a man seeing his ghost come to court again.”

“He was a child,” Francis said. 

“He was a sailor just starting out,” Blanky said. “As you were once, and me. What’s seared into your memory from those days, I wonder?”

“Probably just worried he’ll lack an audience for whichever story strikes his fancy next.”

“Christ a’mighty, Francis.”

“Have you heard about the cheetah?” Francis said. “Have you _heard_ about the _walk_ through the _desert_ to deliver _mail_?”

“Aye, and I don’t need to hear them from you, neither,” Blanky said. “What would make you happy, Frank, hmm? Name one thing, right now, that would make you happy.”

Francis scoffed.

“Other than to reach back through time and pluck myself from the fires of my life to be placed gently into the cool balm of another?”

“Honestly, Frank.”

“Any number of things would make me bloody delirious, Thomas,” he said. He held up a finger. “For James Fitzjames to tell a story about what a _shit_ he is, for once.” He put up another finger. “For the temperature to reach a balmy forty-two degrees.” He put up a third finger and raised his voice. “For Sir John to board this old boat with his entire complement of men and tell me to break west post haste!”

“I couldn’t agree more,” came James’s voice at Francis’s back. Francis startled and whipped around. Beside him, Blanky’s eyes widened but he held his ground. He was always the more stolid of the two of them. 

James stepped inside the great cabin and shut the door. He flicked his coattails out behind him and took a seat beside Francis with his nose in the air. For his part, Francis did his utmost to control the scowl that threatened to pinch his face into the shriveled rind of some dimpled fruit.

“Sir John is quite…obdurate on his position,” James said, looking for all the world as though he belonged exactly where he was. “I had thought to consult with you on next steps.”

“Next steps?” said Francis. A sly smile stole over his lips quite without his volition. “Why, James, are you suggesting mutiny?”

James’s mouth twisted in the corner even as his eyes narrowed.

“Hardly, Francis,” he said. “Although to see me sent down would surely be a boon for your mood.”

Francis sniffed into his cut crystal.

“Pity,” he said. “You were so much more interesting for a moment.”

“Right,” Blanky said, rising to his feet. “That’s me off. Knock at my door if we’re staging a mutiny after all.”

With that, Francis was left alone with James. His mouth arced downward and he slouched in his seat. James linked his hands over his knee and regarded Francis with a curious expression Francis didn’t care to decipher. 

“He would not hear me when I beseeched him again after the meeting,” James said after long moments passed in silence. “Perhaps it would amuse you to hear I debased myself most thoroughly.” His mouth buckled in a poor imitation of a smile. He looked older than he should. Francis had often thought he would turn around and find the boy he knew, looking up at him with eyes that shone with all the wonder of a first voyage.

Francis rubbed his face. Anger seeped from him all at once and was replaced by a weariness that slackened the pinch in his expression. 

“I’m sure you kept your dignity,” he said. “You always do.”

“Francis…”

Francis made himself look up and meet James’s eyes. There was no artifice there, no pretense. Just fear and hope. Just James, looking at Francis as if he could fix it all with a wave of his hand. Francis’s heart stumbled in its timekeeping.

“Francis, what are we going to do?”

“Pray to God Sir John is right, and our Ice Masters wrong.” 

He drank to get the taste of the words out of his mouth.

“That’s—” James shook his head. He planted his feet on the deck and pulled his chair closer to Francis. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, hands spread. His hair flopped about maddeningly. “There’s got to be something, some action we can take. The ice doesn’t lie.”

“Drink, James?”

“What?”

“I can have Jopson bring you Allsop’s if the whiskey’s not to your taste.”

“Francis, are you listening to me?”

“What would you have me do, James?” Francis said, his hand coming down on the table a hair too hard. “Sir John is our first. Profound stupidity does not rise to the standard of insanity or mental defect. Dr. Stanley would laugh us out of his chambers. Anything else _is_ mutiny, as we are both well aware.”

“So you would do nothing,” James said. “You would sit here getting more and more sodden as this expedition sinks beneath you.” 

“You may sit in righteous judgement, James,” he said. “Playing at being reasonable as you excoriate me for the sins of Admiralty protocol. But your very presence on this ship tells me all I need to know.”

James’s jaw worked as he ground his teeth.

“Pray tell me your insights, Francis,” he bit out.

Francis leaned forward, his mouth quirked up in one corner.

“You are as a child with a skinned knee, running to Mother for a kiss,” he said. He sat up straight and refused to look away from James’s face. “My days of playing your nursemaid have passed, and there is no placebo for being packed into the ice.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast. “And no cure for being under the command of a bag of wind. For any of us.”

James held his gaze, but after an unbearable moment, he sighed and looked away. He got up and swept toward the door, and Francis thought that the end of his call, but instead James plucked a cut crystal glass from Francis’s serving tray and took his seat beside him once again.

Francis bestowed a half smile upon him, and poured him three good fingers. 

“Are you staying for supper?” Francis asked. 

James looked up at him, bewildered and still so young after all. 

“Sir John is very cross with me,” he said. 

“I’ll let Jopson know.”

By morning, the ships had become encased in the ice. Francis fancied the crew a mess of discarded toy soldiers, put away in their boxes for the season. He ran his mitted hand over _Terror_ ’s stern and looked out at _Erebus_ half a mile away.

James glanced his way before he was dismissed by Sir John, and then Francis and Sir John were left with each other. Each other, and the whistle of the wind, the groaning of their ships. 

James arrived in _Terror_ ’s great cabin that night in full slops with a bottle of port. 

“A children’s syrup!” Francis scoffed. 

“Indulge me, Francis.”

“I am not good company tonight, James,” Francis said, and James laughed.

“You’re never good company,” he said. “But here I am.”

Francis scowled and turned his attentions back to his map.

“Come on, old man,” James said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to brood over coordinates all night.”

“Why are you so damnably _cheerful_?” Francis groused, but he fetched his glasses anyway.

James made a wordless, pleased sound and clapped him on the back.

“Let’s repair to the deck and look upon our doom,” he said.

Francis cackled despite himself and then called Jopson for his slops.

On deck they leaned their elbows against the starboard side, glasses dangling overboard. Francis imagined them falling and shattering on the ice, glinting a thousand refractions of moonlight. As far as he could see was snow and stars. A longing rose up in his gullet for he knew not what.

A glance at James revealed a brooding mien, eyes fixed upon a point so distant, Francis could not be sure he remained in the Arctic at all. In the present at all.

“Is Himself in a lather?” he asked when half his port was drained. 

“We are to behave as if this is a joyous and inevitable event,” James said. “‘The adventure of a lifetime.’” He snorted and shook his head. He tipped his glass forward and frowned at it as if giving it a deep inspection would fill it back up. “Observing him, one could believe all this troubles him not a whit.”

They lapsed into silence. 

The ice and snow glittered in gentle waves until they were swallowed by the horizon. Bergs jutted up here and there—and backed up ice. Everything white and blue and purple. All peace.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” James said. “Despite everything.”

So often Francis had tried to touch beauty. To be worthy of being in its presence. He felt far from it—a peon to be knocked back. He scrubbed his eyes and blinked out into the great freeze. 

It looked like nothing so much as ruination. There was no beauty before him. 

He turned around and leaned his back against the bulkheads to regard James instead. He was not the boy he was. That was patently clear when Francis met him again as an adult, some ten years past. He had been tall and thin, so strong in the lines and angles of his body as to look more sharp than handsome, but broad of shoulder and deep of voice. It had been a shock to Francis’s system. Sometimes it was still. 

“Is that why you came?” Francis said. “To see it again.” 

James’s eyes slid over to glance at him sideways, but he stretched his neck and stood up straight, gazing into the distance again.

“When I was that stripling lad, swinging away in your quarters, I thought we would find the passage. I believed it wholeheartedly. Even when we wintered in Port Bowen. Even when when _Fury_ became a part of the landscape.”

Francis hummed. James’s gaze drifted over him once again only to pull back.

“Glory then,” Francis said.

James’s mouth twisted in a mockery of a smile.

“What else is there, Francis,” he said. He propped himself against the bulkheads on his elbows, and he was just a man. No legend, no outlandish tale, no glow of public adulation. 

Francis’s longing returned, aimless as a shipwreck. 

James’s visits to _Terror_ thereafter were frequent and regular. Sometimes they took turns casting aspersions upon each other, other times they got in their cups and traded anecdotes fit to laugh at, and still others, rarely, they brooded in silence, staring out at the ice or down at the maps. 

Sometimes, they talked total shite.

“Where would you go if you could go anywhere, right now?” James asked, gesturing expansively with a glass of wine in his hand. “Just to be there, just to see it. No mishaps getting there, no battles or wayward ice. Where would Francis Crozier go just to say he’d been?”

“Too fanciful by half,” Francis said, but James only raised amused brows at him. He sighed and cast his gaze out the window, where there was nothing to occupy his sight, and he had naught but his imagination to dream him elsewhere. “I used to think only of the poles. I wished to map out every possible magnetic field. Now—I don’t know that I have thoughts like that at all.”

“Come now, Francis,” James said. “Everyone has such thoughts.”

Francis sent him a look of consternation.

“Where would you go then?” he asked. “Since you’re obviously gagging to tell me.”

James swung his leg out and popped Francis in the shin. Francis scowled and swiped at his foot, but James darted back too quickly and smirked at him.

“Somewhere warm, I think,” he said. “Can you imagine?” He closed his eyes and sighed.

“But where?” Francis said. “You’ve already been to China, India, Africa, the Mediterranean. South America?”

“Been,” James said with a flap of his hand.

“James. You are deliberately vexing me.”

James sent him a crooked half smile that Francis thought of privately as something reserved for him alone. It warmed him. He wanted, so badly, to be warm.

“You first, Francis.”

Francis sipped his whiskey and considered it.

“I have never been to the West Indies,” he said. “Some fragrant, sunny place, with ripened fruits to pluck off the vine and seas as blue as sapphire.”

“A bungalow on the beach. With—with a kindly woman, who loves you.”

Francis looked up at James, who was gazing at him with a fond expression on his face. Francis felt as though he were floating at sea without a dinghy.

“You now,” he said. 

“Siam,” said James. “I have heard it spoken of as a precious jewel. The ancient relics. The palaces. The food. The people. The elephants.”

“Were you not in India? The capital of elephants.”

“I barely left the dockyards. The closest I got to an elephant was a naughty monkey who hung about the piers stealing sailors’ food.”

Francis laughed, and James’s eyes crinkled about the corners in a smile. This place was aging him. All of them. Francis could barely bring himself to look in the mirror these days.

“Did you draw him?”

“What do you take me for?” James pressed a hand to his chest, his mouth agape in mock outrage. “I am not a man who falls down on his duties, sir.”

“Nothing to draw here, I imagine,” Francis said.

“Mm. The ships. Fagin.”

“Neptune at play,” Francis said. “Neptune in repose.”

James slid another secret smile at him.

“Neptune at his master’s feet,” he said, looking soft. 

Francis’s heart thundered for no discernible reason. He hid his face in another sip of whiskey.

“Perhaps,” he said suddenly, quite without his bidding, “perhaps I would return to Ireland. See Dublin. Galway. Kerry. I’ve only ever been to Banbridge and Belfast. I once overnighted in Londonderry.”

“Home is—a complicated thing.”

“Yes,” Francis said. He looked about the cabin as if seeing it for the first time.

“Do you speak Portuguese, Francis?” James asked.

Francis felt his brow knit in confusion.

“Eh? No, I’m afraid not. My time in Portugal was short.”

“Ah.” 

James reached for Francis’s decanter and poured himself another splash of whiskey. 

“I think I should like to see Brazil again,” he said. “A many-splendored place whose charms I’m afraid I dismissed too soon out of hand.”

Francis hummed an acknowledgement. He raised his glass and met James’s eye.

“To the great wide world,” he said. 

James’s smile had turned melancholy, but he tapped his glass against Francis’s nonetheless.

“To God’s green and icy earth,” he said.  


  
  
  
The final sunset of the year came in late November. James got it in his head that the crews should take advantage of the last rays of the sun with a football match on the ice: Terrors vs. Erebites.

Sir John encouraged it with fatherly indulgence, and when the men began to cajole him, he assented to playing the referee. Cheers rose up and filled the great white silence between the ships. 

Francis readied himself to watch from _Terror_ ’s stern with Blanky beside him. 

“Fancy a wager?” 

“I’ve been burned by those words before,” Francis said, puffing on his pipe. 

Blanky guffawed.

“’Tis a sad day indeed,” he said, “when Francis Crozier’s afeared of a friendly little bet between mates.”

“This is going to end up with me starkers in the bird’s nest again, isn’t it,” Francis said, slanting a half-smile at him.

“Admit it, Frank,” Blanky said. “It was the time of your life.”

Francis was saved from admitting any such thing by James, who jogged up to _Terror_ in nothing but his gansey, long johns, and boots. His hair flew about his head and his color was high. 

“Ho there, Francis!” he called up. “Mr. Blanky!”

“Ahoy, Captain Fitzjames,” Blanky said, raising his voice. “Just looking at you’s making my parts fall off!”

“Join us, then!” James said. “Get your blood up!”

“I see through you, Captain!” Blanky said. “Trying to stack the odds in your favor by playing against the likes of me! I’ll not have it!”

James threw his head back and laughed, one hand clasped to his stomach. Francis’s throat went dry. He groped for his flask. 

“How about you, Francis?” James said. “Loser owes the winner drinks at the finest club in London!”

“I’ll leave all the excitement to you young bucks,” Francis said. “Wouldn’t want to humiliate you on the pitch.”

“You’re such a humanitarian, Francis!” James said, laughing. “Come on—one match!”

“I can’t let my football prowess get out, James—that’s too much power for one man!”

Blanky sniggered beside him.

“Then let’s up the stakes!” James said, pushing the recalcitrant curl away from his face. “Loser treats the winner to a week’s stay at the Cavendish!”

“You’re holding up the match,” Francis said. “Go on now.”

“Where is your joie de vivre, Francis?” Where once James might have lobbed such an accusation at him in anger, now he laughed, saluted Blanky, and trotted toward the makeshift pitch, where the two teams were conferring on strategy in separate huddles. Sir John puttered between them with a scrap of parchment and his fountain pen, which was surely frozen to uselessness already. 

The teams took their places and Sir John signaled the start of the match. The men broke off into what Francis could only assume were their strategic positions—truth be told, other than kicking a ball about occasionally in circumstances not unlike these, he was not particularly fussed about how the game went. 

Blanky kept up a low and mocking commentary—on the Terrors’ collection of left feet, on the Erebites’ farcical prancing, on Sir John’s bellying his way around offsides. Francis whooped whenever Little—and it was always Little—nearly slipped a goal past the Erebites, but he found his eyes drawn to James more than any Terror.

His hair whipped around him like a living crown. His breath hung in the air for only a moment until he sluiced through it as he drove the ball up the icy pitch. Even at a distance, Francis could see the color in his cheeks, the easy joy in his face. Francis thought he could discern the modest curve of lean muscle through the sleeves of his gansey. His legs were long and powerful, his hips slim and articulate as he arced and swept up the pitch, effortless as a dancer with the ball an easy continuity between his feet. James was a ballet unto himself. His was a body meant to be in motion. 

Francis heart ached, thinking of him trapped on these dying ships, becoming a haunt. 

Blanky nudged himself against Francis’s side.

“Watch yourself, Frank,” he said softly. “Your heart’s a tenderer thing than you give it credit for.”

Francis’s heart swooped into the deepest bowl of his stomach.

“Hush,” Francis said. “I knew him as a boy.”

“That’s a man and no mistake,” Blanky said.

James made a goal—his first and the Erebites’ second—and his team cheered. He ran down the pitch shouting, arms upraised in victory, hair streaming behind him. He looked like the wind that fills the sails on a quick and happy journey.

Francis shook his head, swallowing past the dryness in his throat. 

“This is a young man’s game,” he said. “And I’m…” He took a swig from his flask. The words dried up.

“What are you, Frank?” Blanky said. “Are you not human as the rest of us?” 

Francis turned away from him again. There was a pause in the match, and James was stretching, Le Vesconte laughing and slapping his back beside him.

“Whatever I am, it is not suitable,” Francis said. “It is not possible. It is a dream, and this conversation a dissolving gossamer.”

Blanky sighed noisily and leaned up against the bulkheads. 

“I hope you give yourself leave to be happy someday, Frank,” he said. “It’s long overdue.”

James grinned at Le Vesconte and clapped him on both arms. They broke off and the match started again. James was grace incarnate, and Francis was a craggy old man who dared not let hope pulse in his heart.

**1847, The Pack**

There was Sir John’s leg, firstly.

Francis blinked at it, disbelieving, as the men shouted all around him and fanned out. He followed the trail of blood—the brightest and most beautiful spot of color he had seen in years—and found James kneeling before a hole in the ice. He was saying Sir John’s name, voice breaking. He called for a line. He screamed. 

Sir John was gone. Francis staggered but forced himself steady and kept his rifle at the ready. He scanned the ice for any sign of the bear. James looked up at him with wide, guileless eyes as if to implore him: _Save Sir John, Francis. Put him back together, Francis. Rewrite this terrible story, Francis._

Francis’s breath came quick and hard. He pointed to some men and gave orders. He watched a man—someone from Erebus—pick up and cradle the leg as if it were a stillborn infant, precious. Francis told him to bring it back to _Erebus_ with some Royal Marines lest the blood attract the beast.

The world seemed unreal. Slow and muted. His blood felt like sludge. The white swallowed all sound, all sensation. Was it cold?

He pricked his wits awake. He saw James was slumped before the bloody hole, hands limp, palms up on the ice. He gazed unseeing into the depths. He was white and bloodless as fishbelly. There was frost gathering in his eyelashes. Francis was liable to see his nose and ears fall off before his eyes.

Francis scanned for the ice bear and saw nothing. He put his rifle at ease and stepped up close to James. He half-bent to pat his shoulder.

“Come along, James,” he said gently. “You’re freezing.”

It seemed as though James hadn’t heard him. Francis suppressed the curse that longed to trip off his tongue. He made one more sweep for the ice bear and then knelt on the ice. He put both hands on James’s shoulders and squeezed. He ducked his head in an attempt to meet James’s eye.

“James, we have to go,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for poor Sir John now.”

“We have to bury him,” James said through chattering teeth. “We can’t just—leave him there.”

Mentioning the leg seemed crass.

“Rest assured, James, Sir John will be properly attended to. Let’s get you warm, eh?”

Francis set his hands on either side of James’s head, as much to bring him back to the world as to warm the exposed tips of his ears. He forced out a smile when James ventured a glance up at him.

“Come now, James. A hot drink and a nice blanket, what do you say?”

“We’ve lost Sir John,” he said.

Francis pressed his lips together lest they tremble. He nodded and pulled away so he could stand up. He held out a hand. James took it, and Francis levered him up, set a hand on his shoulder.

“The men need us now, James,” Francis said. “They’re looking to us to lead them out of this. Are you with me?”

James swiped at his face. He nodded.

“Good,” Francis said, patting his back. “Let’s go now, and we’ll discuss how to proceed.”

Francis brought him onto _Terror_ for fear _Erebus_ ’s great cabin would be too much for them both. Francis bundled James tightly in all the blankets he had at his disposal, and called for Jopson to brew a strong, hot tea. 

Jopson, bless him, brought tea enough for them both. 

Francis poured a healthy splash of whiskey into their cups. James warmed his hands on the china, nothing but a pale face and shaking hands amid a swath of blankets. Francis could not tear his gaze from him, lest he freeze dead away, or disappear into the maw of a great ice bear before his very eyes. He tucked his face into his own steaming teacup. 

Suddenly James laughed. The edges of his laughter were ragged, as if clogged by tears.

“I’m your second now, Francis,” he said. “It’s everything I wanted but it’s all—” He waved a hand in front of himself. “—twisted up.”

Francis slid his chair closer and laid a hand on the lump of shoulder buried beneath the blankets. 

“I didn’t feel like it at the time, but I was young, as well, during our first expedition.”

James looked up at him, eyes liquid. A lost boy.

“A young man gives his imagination too much slack,” Francis continued. “I dreamed it up so often I thought I could conjure it into being—you and I on our own expedition, captain and commander. We would find the passage at last. We would make every right choice, avoid every pitfall, not come to ruin.” Francis huffed out a mockery of a laugh, himself. “This is not how I conceived it.”

Tears dripped from James’s eyelashes. He wrestled an arm free of his blanket cocoon and placed his hand over Francis’s. His fingers slotted in between Francis’s, and Francis squeezed them.

“What’s to be done, Francis?” he whispered.

Francis sighed. He groped with his free hand for his tea and sipped it down. The burn of the whiskey soothed his nerves.

“We _must_ send out a rescue party. Lieutenant Fairholme can lead it.”

James was shaking his head. He locked his hand around Francis’s and pulled him closer. Francis hit the table with a thud, stumbling stumbling despite being seated. 

“James—”

“No rescue parties,” James said. “Sir John was right about that much. Eight hundred miles, Francis? It’s a death sentence.”

“James, we have no choice!” Francis wrenched himself out of James’s grip. James slumped forward, looking bereft. Francis’s heart took up residence in his throat. He pulled his chair yet closer and slung his arm around James’s shoulders. “There is just enough time,” he said. “Help must be on its way by spring. We will perish without it.”

James took a long draw of his tea, throat working. He was getting his color back.

“And when that—that _thing_ gets our rescue party? With us none the wiser, twiddling our thumbs? No, Francis, I cannot allow it.”

Francis pulled away from him. He filled his teacup back up with whiskey and drained it before filling it again.

“I do not require your permission to issue orders on this expedition, James,” he said. 

James’s mouth worked soundlessly. He set his elbows on the table and stared dully into his teacup.

“Settled into that quickly enough, didn’t you,” he muttered.

Francis ground his teeth together.

“What would you have me do, James?” he demanded. “Our lives, the lives of all these men depend on the choices we make now, and every moment we spend dilly dallying is a moment we imperil them further!”

The hood of blankets fell away from James’s head. His hair was mussed. Francis wanted to smooth it away despite his ire, which irritated him further. He drained his cup of whiskey again and stomped to his feet.

“I’m going to give the order,” he said. 

James’s hand darted out to grab his wrist.

“Don’t, Francis,” James said. He sounded so weary Francis couldn’t help but look down at him. He met red-rimmed brown eyes, splotches of pink riotous and uneven in his pale face. 

“James,” he said with exaggerated patience. “I can do this without you, but it would be better if you were with me.”

“Rescue is already coming,” he said. “It was not the done thing, going over Sir John’s head, but I did it nonetheless. Do not send more men to their deaths, Francis. Please.”

Francis felt the back of his neck heat.

“What are you on about?”

James let him go and turned back to his tea, blinking hard.

“I spoke to Sir John Ross,” he said, not looking at him. “He was imperious and hateful and I—I begged him. _Begged_ him not to leave us out here. He agreed.”

Francis’s breath left him in a great gust and he sank back into his seat.

“God, James.”

“He should be on his way by now,” he went on. “We need only wait, and hope our stores hold.”

Francis stared at him. His vision tunneled until James was all he saw: pink skin and brown hair, cheeks streaked with tears but eyes bright and brave in the lamp light. He was a spot of color in all the white waste of the Arctic; a spot of gold amid all the shit of Francis’s life. 

Laughter pealed out of Francis’s throat violently and without warning. He whooped and slapped his hands on either side of James’s face before bending down and smacking a loud kiss on the crown of his head. He shouted wordlessly again and James looked up at him with big eyes and a hanging mouth.

“James, you fucking beauty!” He laughed and hopped to his feet. He yanked James up and threw his arms around him as the blankets pooled on the floor. “You’ve saved us,” he said. “You’ve bloody well saved us, you thrice-damned genius.”

James sagged into his arms and locked his own around Francis’s body. If Francis’s own gansey was wet when they finally pulled apart, who was to know? 

Days later, Francis led young Thomas Evans, ship’s boy, to his death.

“As I climbed the ridge, I was thinking it,” Francis said. Whiskey sloshed in his glass. “I could see the pattern. But I couldn’t credit an animal with having…”

“You’re saying a bear staged a misdirection?”

The incredulity in James’s voice scraped at Francis’s pride. 

“I’m saying I ordered that we split up into pairs to cover more ground. _I_ did.” He gestured toward himself with his glass, onto which James’s gaze was trained. He drained the whole of it in a single gulp. “And then I left him.”

Evans hadn’t looked like wee Jamie at all—older, taller, blonder, fairer—but Francis could not shake the image, the _fear_ that it was another ship’s boy he’d lost out there, one who had wormed his way into his life, his quarters, his affections. Cleaved into bloody pieces by a bear because Francis hadn’t had his wits about him. Past and present washed into each other in Francis’s mind like a turbulent sea. Like the whiskey he was yet pouring into his cut crystal.

“Christ, James, it could have been you. It _was_ you, once upon a time. Have I been lucky, all this time? Have I been wildly lucky and never knew it?” Whiskey splashed over his fingers.

“Francis.”

“I only took him with me because he was scared.” 

He knocked back another half the glass. 

“Christ, Francis, would you ease up on that?”

Francis snorted and poured more whiskey into his glass.

“Does one not bring one’s habits to _Terror_?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

James wore an angry face. Knit brows and a downward arcing mouth, one side deeper than the other. It was nearly as amusing as it was beguiling.

“Don’t let it bother you,” Francis said. 

A tense moment stretched between them during which James held his gaze for what, Francis knew not. His heart thundered and he nearly let his mouth fall open and his eyes slip shut, but in that instant, James lunged toward Francis and made a grab for his glass. Francis cried out, startled, and stumbled to his feet, glass in outstretched hand, whiskey a great golden arc in the air. He knocked his chair over behind him, and the clatter was as much a shock as the splash of the whiskey on the floor.

“Damn your eyes!” he shouted. 

He had made a tactical error, however, and left the decanter defenseless. The light of triumph suffusing his face, James swiped the decanter up and made for the door. Francis bellowed and dashed around the table, smacking a hip against the edge but succeeding in blocking the door by knocking James back with the wall of his body. James held the decanter up and away from Francis as he scrummed him against the closed door.

“You’ve no right!” he snarled.

“I have every right to insist on the clear-headedness of this expedition’s first!”

“Expedition!” Francis scoffed and pushed James’s shoulders against the door. The decanter bonked against the bulkhead. “What expedition! There is no thaw! There is only ice upon ice upon ice! These vessels will never sail again, do you understand?”

“There is a massive ice bear out there stalking your men and picking them off like flies while you sit here pickling yourself into oblivion!”

“We can’t all get off lucky shots and then take credit for someone else’s kill, _James_.”

“Are you still—” James shoved him away with his free arm. “Fuck _off_ , Francis!”

Francis scrambled for the decanter again, checking his hip into James’s. James swiveled his shoulders and held the decanter up higher. He jerked it to and fro away from Francis’s clumsy, darting hands.

“That’s my property!”

“And it’s made you the worst possible version of yourself!”

Francis pulled down on his arm and pinned him with his shoulders. He locked his hand around the neck of the decanter and over James’s fingers. James bucked against him, free hand bunched in his collar in an attempt to haul Francis off of him. Francis could fashion himself as an immovable boulder, and did so.

“You know nothing about me!” Francis snarled. “Nothing!”

James tucked a shoulder in and slammed it into Francis, who lost the surety of his footing and stumbled backward. James laughed without mirth.

“You can tell yourself what you like, Francis,” he said. “But I knew you when you were generous and courageous, before all your disappointments and resentments built you into this…bitter stew of a man who can barely bloody smile.”

He knocked Francis away, and Francis staggered back. 

“Fuck you, James,” Francis spat.

“Go on and destroy yourself then, Francis,” James said with a sneer. “Finish the job once and for all.”

James pushed the decanter toward him even as Francis lunged at it once more. They collided, and the decanter fell to the floor, spilling whiskey all the way down, while Francis’s elbow knocked James’s jaw. The decanter met the floor with a resounding thud and the whiskey glugged out, but James’s head snapped back against the bulkhead and he hissed. He held a hand to his jaw and blinked hard.

Francis was breathing heavily, attention paralyzed between the loss of his whiskey and James, stunned against the wardroom door. Francis took an uneven step toward him, but he held out a quelling hand.

“I’ve had enough, Francis,” he said, sounding weary. “I’ve—I’ve had enough.”

He slipped out the door and closed it gently behind him.

Francis thought he would have preferred to hear it slam.

**1848, The Vastness**

Francis was stumbling drunk and spitting bile when Tuunbaq boarded the ship and ran Blanky up the foremast. 

Francis felt sober as a judge in the sickbay when Blanky insisted he not be the only one to drink. All around them lieutenants and marines, surgeons and cooks, took their shots of Francis’s best whiskey as Blanky sealed his lips around the mouth of the bottle. 

All seemed slow and bright, sharp as a blade and clearer than someone in Francis’s state had any right to be. The colors, the cold, all the aches along his body, no longer dull. The scratch of his scarf. The weight of his great coat. The taste of blood on his tongue. He fancied he could feel each molecule of oxygen in his lungs.

That shot had been the last drink he would ever take.

He took Blanky’s hand and leaned all his weight into his shoulder. He kept his eyes open. He pressed his forehead against Blanky’s cheek as he screamed. 

“I’m going to be unwell, gentlemen. Quite unwell, I expect.”

Francis was aware that he was weeping. Silently and without bombast, but weeping nonetheless. The tears leaked from his eyes without his volition. Jopson, Little, McDonald and James were kind enough to let it pass without comment. 

He wept as he told them they must see him through it. He wept as he told them he might become a low and begging thing. He wept as he told them not to give in. Not to let on to the men what was happening. Not to come to him for command decisions, but to James for all things. 

He wept as he handed James his last bottle of whiskey.

“Take this out to the spot where the thing’s blood is and pour it out there,” he said. 

James looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time. He took the bottle from his hands. 

Little took the pistol from his hands.

Curious. He could not recall the last time he had wept at all. Tonight, he could not stop.

Francis was swimming.

That seemed inadequate—Francis had been plunged into the depths of a suffocating hell from which he could not scramble his way out no matter how desperately he clawed at what held him under. Sometimes he shook with a violence matched only by the kind of squalls that cracked the mightiest ships.

Francis was afloat in a deep below. Sight had been struck from his eyes. He could hear a pitiful whimpering, dampened as though under water. All sensation was flame to his nerves. All smells a nausea. All taste: iron. 

Sometimes, when he emerged weeping into consciousness, he was aware that he was not alone.

Jopson wiped his brow and his mouth. He cleaned his body and his bed. He did things no steward should have to do for his captain, and he did it all cheerfully and with a steady, gentle commentary, so Francis would not be startled.

“Giving you a wash today, sir,” he might say. “Your hair is quite the fright.”

Or, “What do you think of some of this good broth, sir? Keep your strength up.”

Or, “You mustn’t scare us like that, sir. Our hearts can only take so much.”

Sometimes, it would be Little, who read to Francis from Mr. Bridgens’s vast library, and rubbed his back or shoulder when he keened like a pup for its mother. Little combed his hair. If there was no one else in the room, Little might sing to him.

Sometimes, it was Dr. McDonald, who listened to his heart and lungs and gut, who hummed old Scottish tunes Francis found comforting, who reminisced about happier times.

“Remember when Captain Ross came out in that blue dress? A clavicle any fine lady would envy!”

Or, “I’ll never forget when Captain Parry spooked that Norwegian reindeer and got dragged across a hundred feet of ice.”

Or, “We should go to Stromness again, spend some real time there.”

James came with gentle hands and a quiet voice. He was the only one other than Jopson who sponged his face and chest. He seemed to believe Francis’s prone body a confessional. He might have made a fine Catholic, in a different life.

“I do not believe what hunts us is a bear,” he whispered once, dabbing Francis’s face. Francis could only moan weakly. “I know from bears. I’ve slept under a bear pelt for twenty years. I’ve studied every available drawing of a bear, including my own. I’ve looked into the eyes of a bear and seen the wildness in them. That beast out there—it’s not a bear.”

“Francis, please,” he said another time. A hand closed around Francis’s own, but he had not the strength to squeeze it back. “I can’t do this without you. It’s not meant to be this way. You at the helm and I at your side—we can still have that, Francis. Please wake up. Please live.”

“You’re very brave, Francis,” he said on a different visit. “This is a good, brave, _strong_ thing you’re doing. I admire you most ardently. I hope you know this.”

“I’m glad you love Thomas well enough to put yourself through this,” he said at a later date, wiping Francis’s tears away. “I’m glad there is someone worthy of your regard, even if it can’t be me. You’re saving yourself, Francis. You’re saving us. Remember that.”

And once, brushing the hair back from Francis’s forehead, “You used to call me Jamie.”

Francis came out of his illness just as the sun was set to break over the long dark. 

“Thomas?” he called, and Jopson was by his side. “My slops, if you please.”

“Sir, are you certain you’re well enough?”

“Please, Thomas,” Francis said. “I’ve an old friend to greet this morning.”

Jopson, in his infinite wisdom, insisted Francis take Lieutenant Little with him in his weakened state.

The crew had bundled up and most of them sat now in an improvised courtyard, passing around flasks and grog and Allsop’s. He and Little trudged past them on the way to _Erebus_ , and Francis was surprised and humbled by the warm welcome he received, the open smiles and raised glasses. 

“You’re looking well sir,” he heard more than once. And, “It’s good to see you, Captain.” And, “I prayed for you, sir.”

For the first time in a great many years, Francis felt as though God were smiling down upon him. 

He and Little boarded _Erebus_ , which tilted enough that Little had to steady him with a hand on his elbow. With careful steps, they made their way to the bow, where James stood leaning against the bulkheads with his back to them, studying the horizon. It blazed electric blue with potential.

“Ahoy, James,” Francis said, and James turned around with his brows raised over wide eyes. 

“Francis,” he said, and his face split into a smile. “My God, man, look at you.”

He stepped forward with his hands outstretched, and Francis took them both in his. His own smile felt wider than the open sea, even as something weepy quailed within him. He held it back and swallowed down the lump in his throat. 

“A pleasure to be freed from my berth at last,” Francis said, “and to take in such sights.” He gestured toward the incipient sun, but could not tear his eyes from the naked happiness coloring James’s face.

“It is a momentous day indeed,” James said. “You look so, so well.” Their clasped hands hung between them as they looked into each other’s faces in wonder. Little moved behind them to lean on the port side, attention trained on the men making merry between the ships. James cleared his throat and stepped back, dropping Francis’s hands. 

Francis leaned his elbows on the bow and looked out across the snow drifts. James settled in beside him.

“I must thank you,” Francis said. “For your forbearance, and your discretion, and your care. After all I did to you.”

“Think nothing of it,” James said. “I was happy to do it, and not the innocent in all our…friction.”

“Nonetheless,” Francis said. He inclined his head toward James. “I’m grateful to you.”

James smiled at him, eyes soft.

“I’m the one who is grateful,” he said.

Francis bumped him with a shoulder.

“Pah! We can trade blame and gratitude back and forth like negligible debts ’til the ice melts and the sea swallows us whole. Tell me how you’ve been, James. Tell me what’s been happening.”

James grinned again and reached out to squeeze Francis’s shoulder. He pulled back to lean against the bow and look out again over the ice.

“Spirits are low,” he said. “The men are restive. I have found myself obliged to mediate the pettiest of disagreements between crew members. Captain, commander, primary school teacher.” He snorted. “Sunrise will cheer them, I think.”

“The darkest months are the hardest,” Francis said.

James sighed and clenched his teeth. Francis watched the tightening and release of the muscles his jaw.

“We shouldn’t have had to winter here again,” he said, as though to himself.

Francis rested his cheek in his hand, unabashed in his study of James.

“Where do you suppose Ross is now?” Francis asked.

“Wherever he is, he’s damnably late,” James groused. His tone made Francis huff out a laugh. He sounded like a toff at a posh restaurant, put out by an overcooked roast and liable to berate the wait staff in order to puff himself up. James looked at him with a question in his expression. Francis shook his head and waved a hand.

“The old codger’s probably taking his time to teach us a lesson,” he said.

A silence bloomed between them.

“Or else he’s dead and we wait in vain,” James said into the quiet. He looked down at his hands.

Francis had considered the possibility. 

“We could still send a search party,” he said, and James shook his head.

“There’s no food. We’re going to be on one third rations soon. What food there is is killing us. We won’t last long enough for them to get there and back.” Gingerly, he touched the crown of his head.

“A hunting party, then,” Francis said. He nudged his side against James, who turned a melancholy smile on him. “Three parties in different directions. Surely we’ll find something. Remember how well we ate on that caribou?”

James nodded.

“We’ll have to,” he said. “That’s a good plan, Francis.” His mouth smiled but his eyes remained disconsolate. Francis put his arm around him.

“Don’t count us out yet, James.”

“What reversal of fortunes has brought us here?” James said, slanting a squint over at Francis with a soft laugh. “You the cajoling optimist, I morbing away.”

“Every man’s due a good wallow once in a while,” Francis said. 

James was smiling at him. A hank of curling hair had escaped his Welsh wig. Francis wanted to tuck it away. He staid his hand but tightened the arm about James’s shoulders. His gaze dropped to James’s lips, which had parted. His breath billowed out of him in great streams. Francis swallowed.

The men in the courtyard broke into an uproar and drew their attention. 

“Captain Crozier!” Little shouted, pointing. Francis wheeled and slid his way over to the port side. “It’s Lady Silence,” Little said. “She’s injured.”

“Christ!”

James was at his side with a spyglass to his eye.

“Dr. Goodsir has her,” he said. “Francis—it’s a lot. It’s her mouth.”

“We have to go,” Francis said. “I’ll not have anyone harming her. Edward, you go in my stead, and quickly. James will help me back. We’ll be not a quarter of an hour.”

Little nodded at them both and took off at a jog. James offered Francis his arm and took the slope of the deck slowly in deference to his lingering unsteadiness. 

“Do you think it was the beast?” James asked as they hurried over the ice, Francis clutching James’s arm. 

“I don’t know what to think,” Francis said. “On one hand, it seems as though a claw to the face would have killed her. On the other, what or who else would have done such a thing? Not us. Not her people.”

“Didn’t her father—”

“Yes. Yes.”

They reached the courtyard just as Dr. Stanley emerged at its edges carrying a torch, and once again, time stretched like molasses as Francis took in every detail, every color, every sharp sensation. His heart felt like a shot bird—frantically beating wings, desperate swooping as it plummeted. 

Hickey and Gibson were whispering nearby Dr. Stanley, putting Francis in mind of the snake encouraging Eve to eat the apple. Des Voeux and Tozer were not far off, propping up a catatonic Private Heather between them. Lieutenant Le Vesconte was not far off, watching the ordeal with Lady Silence with concern on his face and a flask in his hand.

Dr. Stanley raised his free hand and dumped liquid over his head. Lamp fuel, by the smell of it. Francis shouted a warning, stretching out his hand. He made to dash over to him, but James was shouting in his ear and holding him back. It happened in an instant that lasted forever—Dr. Stanley dropped the torch and the flames lit up the deepest dark of the Arctic night. 

Screams rose up around him and the men scattered. Hickey and Gibson were consumed by flame, as were Des Voeux, Heather, and Tozer. Heather was dropped, and the men on fire ran. Francis was shouting, wrenching away from James, racing to the scene, but he was too late. He watched Le Vesconte tackle Stanley with an open blanket, and then other crewmen followed his lead in putting out the others.

“Dundy!” James cried, and then James was rushing past him to kneel on the ice. Le Vesconte rolled over onto his back with a groan. His hands were charred and bloody, one side of his face blistered and red. James touched his shoulders, his chest, his hair. “Hold on, Henry,” he said, voice thick.

Francis turned toward the panicked crowd and waved his arms. 

“Dr. McDonald!” he called. “Dr. Goodsir!” 

They were already on their way. He directed Goodsir to Le Vesconte and followed McDonald to the others.

Hickey and Gibson were dead, smoking and crispy and curled together in a heap. Heather was dead, and Francis said a prayer as much for Private Heather as for himself for thinking it an overdue blessing. Des Voeux lived long enough to gasp and expire under Francis and McDonald’s eyes.

Tozer lasted long enough to get him onto _Terror_ , but he too passed weeping, blackened and bloody.

The sun rose, its rays not cleansing but illuminating. There was blood stark on the ice, and the dead were laid out in lines like burned up matchsticks. 

After Francis presided over the service for those who perished in the fire, he repaired to the great cabin, but found himself at a loss as to how to brood properly without a glass of whiskey in hand. He longed for one now. The scent of it. The heft of it in his hand. The burn spilling over his tongue and racing down his throat.

Blanky arrived, stumping, and reclined beneath the window. He propped his wooden leg out straight.

“It galls me, Frank, not to go out on the hunt with you lot.” He crossed his arms over his chest, eyes glittering. 

“It’s only fair,” Francis said with a wink. “Without you there, the rest of us’ll have a shot at a bit of glory.”

Blanky cackled. He rubbed at the join between stump and wood.

“Don’t make me hobble after you just for a good dinner,” he said. 

Francis smiled so he wouldn’t weep. 

“Are you for tea, Thomas?” he asked asked. “I’m afraid I’m off even Allsop’s these days.”

Blanky waved a hand.

“Just galumphing about this thrice-damned boat exhausts me yet,” he said. “I’ll be off for a rest soon enough. I wanted to see your face, is all.”

Francis leaned forward to take Blanky’s hands. He bowed his head, staring unseeing at the knot of their fingers.

“Don’t let’s start,” Blanky said, gruff.

“I’m so bloody sorry, Thomas,” Francis said. 

Blanky bent to press his lips in Francis’s hair.

“I’ll not be the whip you use to flog yourself, Francis,” he said. “We’re beyond that, now, aren’t we?”

Francis looked up and found Blanky smiling at him sadly, eyes fond as if looking down the long scope of nostalgia.

“I’m here now,” Francis said. “I’m finally here.”

Blanky nodded. 

“It’s frightful good to see you, Frank,” he said. He squeezed Francis’s hands.

The door creaked and Blanky raised his head. Francis turned and saw James standing in the door, blinking owlish eyes at them.

“Apologies,” he said faintly. “I’ll come back.”

“Stay, Captain,” Blanky said. “I’m knackered.” 

Francis pushed his chair back and stood to help Blanky to his feet. 

“I don’t mean to put you out, Thomas, truly,” James said. Blanky snorted and lurched past him. 

“Let an old cripple take a nap, Captain,” he said with a smirk, and the door closed behind him.

Francis sat at the table and ran a hand through his hair. James dithered until Francis gestured to the chair beside him and James sat himself down.

“I hope you don’t mind,” James said, “I had Jopson put the kettle on.”

“Oh, thank God,” Francis said, and James cracked half a smile. “How is Lieutenant Le Vesconte?”

James sighed and crossed his legs.

“Recovering,” he said. “Dr. Goodsir says it’s better than he’d expected, but it still looks—” James’s mouth twisted in one corner and he splayed a hand out as if in alarm. “—shocking.”

“His hands got the worst of it?” Francis asked.

James nodded.

“Dr. Goodsir is hopeful he will regain their use.” A rueful smile stole over his face as he met Francis’s eyes. “As for his face, well. It just makes him look more rakish.”  
  
Francis’s heart was battered—by the fire, by the funeral, by Blanky’s easy forgiveness. He felt it bruise further at the way James’s voice warmed to speak of Le Vesconte. He told himself that that was as it should be—if James favored the company of other men, and Francis had his suspicions, then Le Vesconte was exactly the type Francis would wish for him: handsome and charismatic, competent and steadfast. His own age. 

Francis was a foolish old man and a degenerate pervert besides. He hated discovering that it wasn’t the drink that made him so. He resolved to accept his place in James’s affections as a dear friend, a brother, and nothing more. It was enough. It had to be enough. 

“Good,” he croaked, and cleared his throat. “That’s very good news.”

James pushed his mouth into the shape of a smile, but he avoided Francis’s eyes.

“I am—vexed, Francis,” he said.

Francis set a careful hand on his shoulder and leaned in. 

“James…”

Jopson came in with a tea tray then. Francis leaned back in his chair and dropped his arm, smiling up at him.

“Thank you, Thomas,” Francis said, and Jopson inclined his head. He poured two cups and set them before their recipients, and then placed a sugar bowl between them

“There you are, sirs,” he said.

“Much obliged, Thomas,” James said. 

“My pleasure, sir,” he said. “If there’s anything else?”

“No, thank you, Thomas,” Francis said. “This will be like a balm on aching muscles.”

Jopson took his leave. Francis warmed his hands on the teacup as he cast a curious eye over James. His hair was dull and unkempt and he looked haggard about the edges. He was pale and there were dark shadows under his eyes. He was not yet thirty-five, Francis recalled. James scrubbed a hand over his face.

“What troubles you, James?” Francis asked. It seemed a preposterous question once it was out: what was there not to be troubled by, in all of this? One might as well list out each snowflake to be counted on the tundra.

“I have not been a good friend to him, Francis,” James said in a whisper. He slanted his eyes in Francis’s direction, and Francis found them full of reproach. For himself.

“That’s not true,” Francis said. “I have seen you with him. You’re as stalwart a—a friend as any man could hope for.”

James was shaking his head. He patted his chest with a splayed hand.

“No,” he said. “I am a cruel, small thing in all my thoughts. I should have been kinder. I should have been more considerate. I know what I really am.”

Francis turned his chair so he could face James fully. He held his teacup between his knees.

“Listen to me, James,” he said. “Every man’s tragedy is that he must live with himself.” 

James looked up. Sunlight lit his eyes amber. Francis’s heart ached.

“What I mean is,” Francis continued, “none but the Almighty can measure a man by his thoughts. On this side of Heaven, he is measured by his actions. How much he eases the suffering of others. How well he is regarded by those around him. And James—you are beloved, not least of all by Lieutenant Le Vesconte.”

James’s Adam’s apple bobbed. His dropped his gaze to his tea and took a long draw of it. His voice came out raw when he spoke.

“I hope, Francis, that you turn those great stores of wisdom and compassion on yourself once in a while.”

Francis hid his face in his teacup. He had to live with himself, after all.

“I have scurvy,” James said on the fifth morning out. They had not found game. They would not find game.

Francis wheeled around to face him, incredulous. 

“Fuck, James,” he said. 

James’s mouth curved upward in some imitation of a smile.

“It’s in the muscles,” he said. “I’m tired all the time, no matter what the hour. I’m bleeding out of the sockets of my teeth now. Have you ever contended with it?”

Francis couldn’t speak. He shook his head. He tried to look as though his heart hadn’t been dashed against a jagged iceberg.

James spoke cheerfully about walking, about his desire to span Asia and Russia and Europe on foot. Now, his knees hurt. His hips. His feet. 

“Christ, you should have stayed at camp,” Francis said. James slanted another smile at him. He was too peaceful about it by half.

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” he said. He threw his hand out at all the blinding white, but his eyes were trained on Francis’s face. “Being out here, with you.”

“Would that this hunt were as fruitful as the last,” Francis said.

“Could do without the bear this time,” James said with a huff of laughter.

Tuunbaq had not haunted their ships since the night it had claimed Blanky for its own. Francis could only hope Blanky’s fire and James’s cannon had finished it, but he was on alert nonetheless. 

“Lucky I’ve got my bear hunter with me,” Francis said, and James squinted at him over a rueful smile.

“Do you remember when I called Sparshott over at that stuffed-up banquet?” he said. “He threw that bloody bear in both our faces.”

Francis groaned. 

“Don’t remind me,” he said. “What a pair of fools we were.”

“I mean, Francis, do you know why I told the bear story the way I did? Do you know why I went to sea in the first place?”

Francis looked at him with naked curiosity. His face and lips were chapped—what Francis had believed to be the ravages of the cold were in fact the illness winding its way through James’s blood and bones. Francis reproached himself for his blindness. He should have been able to see James ailing, even if the prospect was anathema to him. 

He shook his head in response.

James turned away and huffed out a laugh, tucking his chin to his chest.

“I’m a fake, Francis,” he said.

Francis arched an eyebrow at him. 

“James, if I ever made you feel—”

“Don’t, Francis,” he said with a wave of his hand. “You know it. You’ve always known it—you saw through me from the start. A soft southern lad with a hedgerow and a governess—why should such a delicate petal have traded his featherbed for a Navy-issue hammock? There can be no hiding from the sharp insight of Francis Crozier.”

“You fell in love with the sea!” Francis said. “I saw it with my own eyes!”

They stopped walking and faced each other, the six feet between them suddenly a yawning distance impossible to close. James sent him another sad, squinting smile. Francis’s lungs weighed heavy on his heart.

“My father—” James cleared his throat. Francis’s ears pricked up—never had he heard those words pass James’s lips, unlike many a powdered dandy who occupied the upper classes. “My father was a troublesome figure for the government to manage. He ruined himself with debts and merriment. He was sent far from sight to Brazil, where he served, for some definition of the word, as consul general. In reality he was straying from his marriage bed most freely.” He broke away from Francis’s gaze and looked off into the distance. “My mother was likely from one of the Portuguese families in exile there, or perhaps even a native. I was never told more.” He met Francis’s eyes again. He said, in a strong voice into the sharp air between them, “I’m a bastard, Francis.”

Francis knew not what to say. Was he meant to think less of him? He did not. He could not.

“Some of his relations were put upon to find a family to raise me,” James went on. “Even my name was made up for my baptism. ‘James Fitzjames.’” His lip curled in contempt. “Like a bad pun.” He gestured out at the desolation of white all around them and twisted his mouth into another pained smile. “So you see. I’m a fake Englishman. A fake hero.”

Francis stared at him. Memories that had once seemed incongruous cascaded neatly into place. No mother and father but an aunt and uncle. The olive complexion. Had he not once asked Francis, seemingly apropos of nothing, if he spoke Portuguese?

“I didn’t know any of that,” Francis said.

“I’ve never said it out loud before,” James said. He shifted from foot to foot. “The Coninghams were good people who were good to me, but I was reminded every moment of every day in ways great and small that I was as a cuckoo in a kinder bird’s nest. That I would be hindered in all my freedoms unless I could invent a different destiny—a different James Fitzjames. So at twelve I sought an adventure in the farthest place from Brazil I could imagine. I thought to build myself a great, gilded life that didn’t humiliate me to live.” He swept a hand toward Francis, and the smile that parted his lips now was a real one. “And there you were, watching over me. Teaching me. Protecting me. You have always been the voice at my back, keeping me honest.” His mouth twisted. “Even when I didn’t want to be.”

Francis stepped over snow and ice to reach him. James plastered a strained smile over the worry in his eyes, as if afraid Francis would discard him without ceremony if he were not placated by a comely countenance. 

“James,” he said. “You are not some gold-plated coin to be bitten and assessed for worth.”

James shook his head.

“That bloody bear,” he said. “Birdshit Island. The Chinese sniper. All my stories. Can a man become a legend if he but speaks of it long enough?”

Francis reached out to squeeze his shoulders. He smiled up at him. Tears dropped from James’s eyes. 

“Hang the legend,” he said. “It is better to court goodness and mercy. To look upon the pride and ruination of your superior officers and choose the lives of your men over saving face. To be tender-hearted in a world filled with cruelty. To offer your friendship and brotherhood to one who does not deserve it, but needs it more than anything.”

“Are we brothers, Francis?” James asked. Another tear tracked down his cheek. “I would like that very much.” 

“We have always been thus, James,” Francis said. “Why else would I come on such a fool’s errand again, but to keep you safe?”

“But what of Miss Cracroft?” he blurted. “Sir John had made—implications.” He looked apologetic for raising the subject.

Francis snorted, nodding.

“Ensure Sir John’s judgement, yes,” he said. “That’s what she wanted me to do, for all the good it did. But I didn’t sign my name to anything until I realized you would be on _Erebus_ —the true second of the expedition in all but name.”

“God, Francis.”

“How could I let you go out into the cold again without me?”

James laughed and swiped at his eyes. Francis dropped his hands from his shoulders even as a sudden conviction, hot as fire, rose up to grip him by the throat. 

“What a prize pair we are,” James said. 

“We’re going to get you well, James,” Francis said. “I’m going to see you through this and no mistake.”

Francis had spent long years being able to conceive of nothing beyond the reality of his own thwarted ambitions, complete with a drunkard’s sense of paranoia and tendency toward recrimination. Freed of the drink these last several weeks, he found the wild turns of his imagination had returned to him, and now it unspooled like runaway thread: James, hale and hearty, taking a stroll through a stately English garden with a flush in his cheeks and a breeze in his clean, shining hair. Lean rather than gaunt in a suit of the latest fashion, appearing for all the world as though he had never been ill at all.

And, because he was just a man and a weak one at that, Francis imagined himself at James’s side.


	4. Chapter 4

**1848, Salvation**

When James collapsed, so too did his senses into a single, nebulous throb wherein all was pain. Sound and sight, smell and taste—each was subsumed by the sensation of his body deteriorating like a corpse while he was yet trapped inside. So too did his awareness narrow into an aperture not unlike that of his old spyglass—a gift from Francis at the end of their first journey together, now lost to time, travel, misfortune. Somewhere in the storage in his berth, though, was the bear pelt, folded away neat and clean where he could not soil it.

He was aware when he had company, some of the time. He was aware when Bridgens tended to him with all the tenderness James imagined of a mother, when he read to him and dabbed his bloody tears away. He was aware when Dundy came to his bedside and tried to tell ribald stories whose jokes did not land for the humidity present in his throat. He was aware when Dr. McDonald came in and examined him, tutting, and declared him far too handsome to die.

Sometimes, he even smiled and spoke back.

Francis came whenever he could. He held his hand and fussed with his hair and made sure he was warm. He told him all manner of things—what the crew was doing, who else he had sat with today, shenanigans with cows and haylofts and church candles of his youth.

“Dr. Goodsir and Thomas—Blanky, that is—have gone on a sledge party with the Lady Silence to seek help from her people.” 

Or, “Our Thomas is declining. It was a spot of fun though, to be the one who makes him tea, shaves his beard, helps him take his broth. We should make him a lieutenant, when all this is over. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, let it be over.”

Or, “God, James. I feel like I never learned to pray until now. Now I am God’s most devoted penitent, his most pious acolyte, my hands clasped over you, over Thomas, over Mr. Peglar and the rest. God, let me find us a way out of this.”

Or, “Why did we wait for Ross? How were we so foolish? I have failed you. I have failed us all.” 

Or, “Do you remember the time we came upon those fat seals on the ice with Captain Parry? Of course you do. You petted them like dogs and they yowled for more. I wished _I_ was an artist that day. I wish I could have captured how happy you were. How happy I was.”

James kept his eyes trained on Francis’s face, when he was able to open them at all. He held fast to his hand. 

He no longer thought of living through this. Through the haze of his pain, his mind was occupied with the hope that Francis would live through this. That Francis would lead what men he could into a place where they could be made whole again. That Francis would return to England, and remember him fondly. 

Yes, he held Francis’s hands, and smiled at his jokes, and joked back when he had the strength. He hoped that in this way, Francis could feel his unwavering confidence in him. His enduring affection. His conviction that while life was beyond his reach now, his death was made a soft one by his dearest friend’s company. 

He only wished he had more to give him, here, at the end.

The end did not come. 

Instead, the Netsilik came. An entire band accompanied Lady Silence, properly called Silna, and Dr. Goodsir, and Mr. Blanky, and the body of a freshly slaughtered seal. 

Raw liver was pressed onto James’s tongue and massaged down his throat. Mr. Bridgens laid a hand on his head, thumb stroking the hair away from his brow, and fed him slowly, over the course of an entire afternoon. James found he could keep his eyes open. He could sit propped up in his cot. Hours into the process, he could swallow on his own. Bridgens looked on the verge of tears.

Francis relieved him late in the day.

“Henry’s asking for you,” he said. 

“Thank you, Captain,” Bridgens said. James’s eyelids felt heavy, but he watched the two of them shake hands, and then Bridgens put his face in one hand, shoulders slumping forward. Francis squeezed his biceps. 

“You’ve done so well, John,” he said. “Go on, now.” 

Bridgens straightened and nodded. He looked back at James, who mustered a smile for him. Bridgens smiled back even as his brows came together as if in a frown, and then he was gone. Francis sat down, pulled a chair right up to the edge of James’s cot, and produced another plate of raw meat.

It should be vile. It should be unpalatable. It should be something to be endured manfully and then never spoken of again but in hushed, sneering tones. But in truth, it was manna from heaven. 

“This is a boon for us,” Francis said, feeding James livid pink bits with a fork. “Thomas is a better diplomat than any of us could have credited.”

“Surely it was Goodsir’s charms most of them were beguiled by,” James said.

Francis snorted, sending him a crooked smile under that arched brow. 

“Thomas has a certain… gruff appeal, let us say.”

Francis swooped in with another chunk of seal and James chewed and swallowed without tasting it. He let the knowledge wash over him dully: Francis and Blanky. Francis’s eyes did alight on the male form, but his attentions were reserved for Blanky. It made good sense. He had always spoken of him fondly, glowingly even, on the Parry expedition and in his letters, before they dried up in the wake of the disastrous promotion banquet. Francis and Blanky were of an age. They shared opinions, values, senses of humor. Francis did not think of Blanky as the squirming child he must have been before they ever met. 

James resolved to be happy for them. 

“You should eat as well, Francis,” James said.

“I’ve had my share,” Francis said. 

“You’ve been hand feeding Jopson and Peglar and Irving and likely all of us thus afflicted, and speaking to the Netsilik, and making sure everyone’s comfortable and in good spirits before thinking of tending to yourself.” 

Up went the brow.

“That’s a captain’s prerogative.” 

“Eat, Francis,” James said. “I’m stuffed so full I couldn’t manage another bite.”

Among those Netsilik who had descended upon them were seal hunters, and caretakers, and healers. They made camp in the courtyard between _Terror_ and _Erebus_. Starving men with suddenly full bellies forgot their fear and revulsion for the native peoples of this land, and thanked them with hands clasped as if in supplication to God.

James’s condition improved quickly and dramatically. He began to walk around the ship and then the courtyard. Men greeted him with joy on their faces. Mr. Collins enveloped him in a hug that was so fervent, he was lifted off his feet. Jopson was well again. Henry Peglar. Ned Little. Lieutenants Irving, Hodgson, and Fairholme. By the grace of the Netsilik, they had been plucked from the brink of death. 

Tuunbaq, if it yet lived, did not darken their proverbial doorstep. 

Peace stole over the camp. The well men kicked the football around with some of the Netsilik men. Crew members showed Netsilik their maps and spyglasses, Netsilik showed crew members how to carve spear heads from seal bone. They built fires and taught each other words in their respective languages—including Scots. Together, they laughed and shared food. 

Every week there was a new seal. Sometime in May, it was a narwhal. The hunters, smiling, presented its tusk to Francis as a gift. The crew broke out into cheers and applause, James with them. He hoped he, Blanky, and Jopson were the only ones who knew Francis well enough to see he was holding back tears as he thanked them in their tongue.

Francis met his eyes across the courtyard and grinned. He looked young then. His hair was pale and his face haggard, but he looked younger and lighter than James ever remembered him being. Christ, but he was lovely. Far lovelier in James’s estimation than he’d ever been before. He raised the narwhal tusk as if in a toast. James laughed. Blanky, limp more pronounced than it was previously, came up and clapped an arm around Francis’s shoulder. Francis turned to look at him and then they were both laughing at whatever gruff and appealing thing it was that Blanky said. 

James’s heart faltered. He turned and made his way back to _Erebus_. Perhaps Dundy fancied a drink.

In June, a pair of Netsilik scouts, reedy lads in late adolescence, came running back to camp. James looked up from a chess game he had set up out on the ice with Dundy. Dundy was on his feet in a trice.

“I’m for the armory,” he said, and dashed away. “I’ll get you a rocket!” he called back. 

James’s knees still creaked when he stood. He caught sight of Francis jogging from one of the Netsilik tents, and he did his best but he was still ginger on his feet. When Francis and the boys met and stopped, the boys were gesticulating expansively, nearly buzzing from their skins. By the time James arrived, Francis’s face had opened into an expression James was dumbfounded to see: awe, disbelief, giddy excitement. He looked like a child woken on Christmas morning only to be told he was the new owner of a prize pony.

“What is it, Francis?” James asked, panting.

“A ship to the northeast,” he said. He seized James by the shoulders and shook him. “An English captain come with a translator. They’re looking for us, James. They’ve come at last.”

James’s knees buckled, but Francis held him up, laughing. He hauled him into an embrace that squeezed the air from his lungs. James bunched up fistfuls of Francis’s coat in his hands, and then he was laughing too. The boys had run to camp, no doubt to spread the news.

Francis linked their arms to lend James his steadiness and led them back. 

“We should tell the men to start packing their personal belongings,” he said.

“We’ll make an accounting of any useful and transportable stores,” James said.

“Work on preserving what we can of the seal meat.”

“Whatever ship and stores they’ll have brought will be burdened by the absorption of nearly two more crews.”

Francis nodded. 

“We’ll send scouts out to meet them and apprise them of our situation,” he said.

“Lieutenant Fairholme, Tom Hartnell, a few of the Royal Marines.”

“Yes—good, trustworthy men,” Francis said. “Add Dr. McDonald so someone can speak to those Netsilik lads. I’m tempted to go myself, but—”

“You’re still needed here,” James said. “I’m recovering, but the fleet has yet to return to my foot.” 

Francis’s squinted a smile at him. 

“James,” he said. “It will.”

The scouting party delivered Sir James Clark Ross and Ice Master Bertram Dixon to the wreckage of HMS _Terror_ and HMS _Erebus_ two days later. James shook Dixon’s hand as Ross and Francis greeted each other with a hearty embrace.

“I thought you’d be your uncle!” Francis said.

“And I thought you’d look less damnably _dashing_ after all this, Francis Crozier!”

They laughed and hugged and slapped each other on the back. 

Many of the men were openly weeping as James and Francis escorted Ross and Dixon into the courtyard between the ships. They lined up to shake Ross’s hand, and some even pulled him abruptly into their arms for a hug. Ross took it with good humor, setting aside decorum for compassion. He and Dixon also produced from their travel packs great jugs of lemon juice, which was met with a mix of laughter, cheers, and groans.

James, Francis, Ross, Dixon, Blanky, Dundy, and Little repaired to the wardroom on _Terror_ to discuss the walk to Ross’s ship, which was docked in a makeshift port some thirty miles north-northeast. Jopson, the spring lately returned to his step, insisted on serving tea and Allsop’s. 

Strategizing fell by the wayside an hour later, and so began the catching up.

“It was the most damnable thing, Francis,” Ross said. “At Lady Jane and Miss Cracroft’s bequest, that insufferable Dickens fellow whipped the public into a near frenzy to send ships after you. I had been pleading your case for at least a year, and those pleas fell on deaf ears until quite suddenly at his birthday dinner with the whole clan this past winter, Uncle John interjects with, ‘I suppose we ought to go get those boys now.’” Ross threw his hands up in shock. Francis was smiling fondly at him, shaking his head in wonder. James ventured a glance at Blanky, whose demeanor looked as unruffled as ever. 

Ross reached around the corner of the table to pat James on the shoulder.

“This one was wise enough to extract a promise from Himself, but the stubborn old prick kept mum about it for a bloody _year_ after he was meant to go after you. ‘Send me instead,’ I said when the Admiralty finally agreed to send a rescue party. ‘Sir John is frail and unlikely to survive the journey,’ I told them. Truthfully, I worried he’d sail his ship directly into a landmass and we’d just have to send another bloody rescue!”

James forced out a smile because the situation called for it. He was meant to be grateful, and he was, truly—to Sir James. But Sir John Ross _had_ held out to teach them a lesson. Sir John Ross _had_ meant to punish them. In the extra year and a half they’d spent on the ice, they had been hunted by an otherworldly devil, they had been starved and laid low by illness, they had buried some twenty more men, including Sir John Franklin, and for what? So Sir John Ross could feel smug. Powerful. Superior. James clenched a fist on his thigh beneath the table where no one could see.

“Let us think of happier things,” he said. “You’re here now.” He raised his teacup, and around the table cups of tea and glasses of Allsop’s and flasks full of ice melt rose with it. “To Sir James Clark Ross.”

“Patron saint of lost sailors,” Francis added. Everyone laughed. Drinks tapped drinks all around, and they toasted to their staid executions.

They abandoned _Terror_ and _Erebus_ mere days later. The crew made their goodbyes to the Nesilik even as they readied themselves to pull a complement of sledges thirty miles over ice and snow. They exchanged harpoons and spyglasses, compasses and seal skin hoods. James saw brown hands clasped in white ones. James hoped this was in the songs, the papers, the books. He hoped he would never hear the word “savage” uttered again. 

He scanned the crowd for Francis and caught sight instead of Dr. Goodsir, face cradled in Silna’s hands, their foreheads pressed together. James felt a lump rise in his throat and he looked deliberately away. 

Francis found him and graced him with a smile. Their eyes met and then they turned, as one, toward their ships, reaching with all their proud glories into the unfeeling sky. James knew with the certainty of a zealot that his thoughts and Francis’s were the same. Past and present layered before them on an icy canvas.

“‘Hast thou courageous fire to thaw the ice/of frozen North discoveries?’” James said. 

“Marlowe?” Francis asked.

“Donne,” James said. He shook his head. “More a religious exultation than literary diversion, but…” He swallowed. “This feels religious, doesn’t it? I end where I began—with a moored ship, spared my dignity and my life by someone else’s generosity. If that’s not the work of God, I don’t know what is.”

“You’ve hardly ended, James.”

James slanted a smile at him.

“I’ll not sail again, Francis,” he said. He took one last look at their doomed ships. He rubbed where his bullet holes were healing for the second time. “This is what ice does.”

Ross’s ship turned out to be a civilian passenger ship—big enough to boast enough cabins and steerage space to accommodate three crews with some squeezing, but small enough to navigate the dodgy and unpredictable narrows of Arctic sailing. 

The first mate, a stocky fellow named Cochran with a ponderous, stumping gait, led James and Francis to a first class cabin that boasted, of all things, a hastily hung hammock that swayed gently beside a berth nearly twice the size of the one James occupied on _Erebus_.

He and Francis looked at each other. Francis’s mouth twitched, and James had to tamp down on the hysteria that threatened to bubble up from his gullet. He turned his attention sharply back to Cochran, lest looking at Francis induce a fit.

“There you are, captains,” Cochran said. “Sorry ’bout the hammock’n all, but needs must with quarters so tight. Sir James says you’re to call on us for anything, sirs. You’re our guests, he says.”

“Thank you, Cochran,” Francis said. “I’m sure we will take that to heart.”

When he left, James burst into a gale of laughter so strong he doubled, propping his hands on his knees. He leaned against a bulkhead to stay upright, and Francis’s mirth joined his own in a din that scraped at his eardrums, but he could hardly bring himself to care.

Once they got hold of themselves, Francis shouldered James out of the way and tested the integrity of the hammock by pressing his hands into the canvas and bouncing them like a naughty child on a featherbed.

“I’ll take the hammock this time,” he said.

“Francis, you couldn’t possibly—”

Francis turned on him, brow arched high. He poked a finger toward James’s face.

“I’m your captain, and you’re in the bunk,” he said. “That’s an order, James.”

James snorted. He tipped himself back into said bunk and watched with undisguised glee as Francis attempted, in vain, to swing himself into an apparatus he had probably not slept in for over twenty years. 

With an emphatic curse, Francis finally hauled himself into the hammock, which swung wildly in place. Francis jerked his shoulders to and fro, trying to get comfortable. James sighed with the last dregs of his laughter.

“This is silly, Francis,” James said. “I thought you’d share with Thomas, anyway.”

“Eh? Thomas?”

“Blanky, I mean,” James said hastily. “Because you’re—” He rotated his wrist in the space between them as if his fingers could pluck the right words from the very ether. “—so close.”

Francis twisted himself over to face him. 

“I do appreciate his company a great deal,” Francis said.

 _Appreciate?_ If this was the temperature of Francis’s affections, perhaps James ought to try harder to let his heart’s stubborn dream of him pass.

“—but I’m afraid he’s unwell and thus staying close to sickbay,” Francis said. “Jopson has volunteered to attend him.”

James heartbeat stumbled. They were so close to shut of this place and still they might suffer more losses. That it could be Blanky—steadfast, towering Blanky—was a blow.

“Is it his wound?” he asked.

Francis’s mouth flattened to a grim line.

“The Netsilik medicine woman was able to stave it off for some time, but the infection is back. He’ll likely need another amputation.”

“Great Christ.”

Francis nodded, eyes sad over a crooked smile.

“He’s a hardy one, our Blanky,” he said. “I intend to deliver him to his wife hale, if not whole.”

James sat up in the berth, planting his feet on the floor and leaning forward to keep his head from hitting the bulkhead above. He was close enough to push Francis like a child in a swing.

“Mr. Blanky is married,” he said.

“Mm. ’Course he is, the charmer. Four children as well.” Francis’s smile was wide now—the one that lit up his face and showed the space between his front teeth, unabashed. “I stood for him at his wedding, you know.”

“I—no, I didn’t know that.”

“Esther,” Francis said. “Surely I’ve mentioned her.”

“Francis, you have not.”

“Then I’ve been remiss,” he said. “Strong as ten men and not shy, Esther Blanky. Doesn’t suffer fools. It’s a miracle she lets me hang about.”

James knew, of course, that many a naval man was flexible on the subject of his marriage vows, but Blanky did not seem the type. Nor was Francis the type to abet such a betrayal. He would consider it an affront to his integrity. No, Francis was much likelier to step away from his own happiness and suffer—perhaps not so discreetly—at a distance.

He did not look to be suffering now.

James’s breath was too heavy. Francis cast a curious gaze over him.

“Are you quite all right, James? I can fetch McDonald or Goodsir.”

“I am well, Francis,” he said. He waved a hand and levered himself out of the berth to rummage in his belongings. “Very well, even. We’re going home.”

He stood and unfurled the ice bear pelt with a flourish. Francis’s laugh clapped between the bulkheads.

“Jesus Christ, James,” he said. “Would you look at that.” He shook his head, still grinning. “I can’t believe you hauled it all this way.”

“How else was I to keep warm in the Arctic?” he said imperiously. He shook it out and laid it flat in the berth, and then slipped his body beneath it. The hide was soft as butter, worked and battered all these years. He sighed to feel its weight settle over him again. He put his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles. Francis was looking at him with soft eyes. 

What did he see, James wondered. The man he was today, barely adequate though he may be, or the child twenty years gone, preserved forever in the imperfect amber of memory?

Hope, that cheeky ember, flickered low in his belly. 

A month into breaking and dodging ice on their slow journey, and James and Francis were squabbling about the hammock. Again.

“You’re not _sleeping_ , Francis; anyone with eyes can see.”

“And you’re recovering from scurvy!”

“The space between ‘recovering’ and ‘recovered’ is a hair’s breadth at this point,” James said. “Take the bloody bed!”

“I’ll be damned if I take a bed from a sick man!”

“Francis! I’m not ill!”

“And I’ll not be responsible for a setback!”

“You’re crazed from lack of sleep!”

A loud whistle startled them into springing back from each other. They turned in tandem toward the door, where Captain Ross was standing, hands on hips.

“Sounds very serious indeed!” he said. “And from all the way down the corridor. What is the nature of your disagreement, gentleman?”

“It’s my turn in the hammock, Sir James,” James said. 

“It is no such thing!” Francis said. “The hammock is mine into perpetuity!”

“Oh my,” Ross said.

“You see,” James said. “You see how unreasonable he’s being.”

“There has never been a more reasonable human being in the history of mankind than I am in this moment,” Francis said.

James rolled his eyes Heavenward.

“Now, now, children,” Ross said, clapping his hands once. “Let us settle this like men.”

Francis eyed him suspiciously.

“And how’s that,” he said.

Ross smirked and took the final three steps into the cabin. He peered around Francis until his gaze alighted upon the blanket rolled up and propped in the corner, the tip of the narwhal tusk peeking out of the top.

“I had heard,” Ross said, removing a white glove from his jacket pocket, “that you were in possession of a full-sized narwhal tusk.”

“Aye,” Francis said. “A gift from the natives.”

As if performing before an audience, Ross shook out the glove, looked Francis in the eye, and smacked him in the chest with it.

“I challenge you to a duel,” he said. 

“I _beg_ your pardon!” Francis said.

Ross sent James an impish look before straightening up and meeting Francis’s gaze again.

“You win, you get the hammock,” he said. “I win, Fitzjames here gets to swing in that deathtrap to his heart’s content.”

“I say—”

“You’re on,” Francis said, and then the two of them were shaking hands with far too much vigor.

“On deck in a quarter hour,” Ross said, and with a flourish of his coattails he was gone. 

Francis whirled around with a cackle and seized the narwhal tusk. He unfurled it from its blanket and gripped its base in both hands, raising it high before him. It hit the low ceiling and he grumbled.

“Francis,” James said, “Francis, do not stab the captain who is spiriting us from the jaws of death.”

“All in good fun, James,” Francis said, adjusting his grip on the tusk. He sent James a rakish half-smile. “Besides, won’t it give you a thrill to root against me?”

“Oh, Captain, I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, batting his lashes with a hand splayed on his chest. Francis laughed and planted the end of the tusk on the floor. He leaned on it like a walking stick.

“Let’s give the men a spectacle they’ll not soon forget,” he said.

On deck the men had gathered while Ross held court with an ornate, curved talwar upraised for their perusal.

“When I was a midshipman awaiting my voyage in Bombay, what did I find lurking in my privy but a King Cobra!” A din of mixed laughter and gasps of shock rose up around him. He grinned, and a few paces behind him, Francis laughed. “I hopped to with all the bravado of a young man. The only weapon at my disposal was this, mounted upon the wall!” He unsheathed and thrust the glinting talwar into the air to a round of cheers. “’Twas this very blade I used to part the beast from its infernal head!”

The men stomped and cheered and filled the cold wastes of the Arctic with their mirth. James tightened his arms around himself. He should be as fully enraptured by the diversion as they were—he would have been, but three years ago. Now he felt separate from it all and cold for it. He could look only at Francis, laughing at the appropriate parts of Ross’s story, leaning on his tusk with all the insouciance of a rogue assured of his victory and at ease with his stature: manful, broad, strong. He wore nothing but his shirtsleeves and trousers. He was a sight to behold, and James was jealous of his attentions.

Dr. McDonald entered the makeshift ring. Francis and Ross squared up and saluted to one another. With that, McDonald called for the bout to begin and Francis and Ross began to circle each other. 

“Come on Sir James!” someone shouted.

“Get him, Captain Crozier!” someone else shouted.

James clapped distractedly.

Ross tried to assume a fencing stance with the talwar, but only succeeded in looking vaguely ridiculous. For his part, Francis held the tusk out like a Scottish broadsword; it was too long and heavy for anything else. The men laughed and James found himself smiling, too. Ross lunged, Francis parried. Francis advanced, Ross retreated. They whirled around each other swinging and thrusting their respective blades with no particular skill or strategy beyond merriment and enthusiasm. Each attack was broadcast in a more preposterous manner. Francis was even pulling faces, which made something in James’s heart twinge.

Soon enough their weapons were thudding against each other, producing a series of bonk sounds that only rendered the entire exercise more farcical. The footwork was as a parody of a ballet, heightened for comedic effect. Around James, men were nearly weeping with laughter, slapping their knees, the backs of their fellows.

Francis’s eyes were bright with joy, his face flushed, his breath heavy. James could see the muscles in his shoulders, back and arms flexing through the thin layer of his two shirts. He was laughing too, gaze trained on Ross. 

Dundy sidled up to him and nudged him with a shoulder. James glanced over and found him smirking most smugly.

“He does make a picture, doesn’t he?” he said.

“Who, Sir James?” James said, the picture of innocence.

Dundy snorted.

“I never knew why you were so stubbornly fixated on him,” he said, and looked out toward the bout. Francis was chasing Ross about with the tusk raised high above his head. Men were howling with laughter. “But seeing him thus, perhaps I could be convinced.”

James tore his eyes from the bout and looked at Dundy with wide eyes. His face was healing, cheek shiny and regaining some of its shape. He looked softly back at James.

“Dundy…”

Dundy clapped him on the back and stemmed any embarrassing outbursts—probably for the both of them. He nodded toward the ordeal in the ring.

“Your man’s about to win,” he said. 

James looked over at the bout, where Francis was standing over a kneeling James Clark Ross, tusk raised high. Ross hung his head in defeat and presenting his talwar in both hands like a roast on a platter. Francis played at bringing the tusk down with great force, but James watched as he stopped the progress inches from Ross’s shoulder and then tapped him, gently as a lover’s kiss, on both shoulders.

“I dub thee King James Clark Ross, sovereign of these frozen wastes!”

The men laughed, and James did too, clapping. When he turned, Dundy was gone from his side. He stood near the port bow with Little and Hodgson, grinning at whatever turns their conversation had taken.

James turned back to the bout. McDonald held Francis’s hand up in the air and declared him victorious. Ross was beside him, grinning and shaking him. James pushed through the clutch of men to get to them, formulating some quip about the hammock. Francis’s face lit up as he approached. His color was high and his skin shone with exertion. It had rendered his eyes the same vibrant blue as the sky. James’s heart swooped inside him. 

“Come, Francis,” Ross was saying. “Have a drink with me.”

Francis blinked and turned to his friend. He smiled but shook his head.

“Make it a lemon water and you’re on,” he said. 

Ross threw his head back and laughed. 

“You’ve grown peculiar in your old age, Francis,” he said. “How charming!”

He left, presumably to ready the drinks in his great cabin, and James felt the air shift and grow humid in the space between Francis and him. 

“You’re very good with a narwhal tusk,” he blurted. 

Francis flashed him the gap in his teeth.

“I had the honor of my hammock to defend,” he said. 

James smiled as his heart began to race. He put his hand out and Francis grasped it tightly. The hot pads of his fingertips brushed the inside of James’s wrist. His breath caught. He could not tear his eyes from Francis’s.

Someone called Francis’s name and he turned, dropping James’s hand. With a glance of apology, off he went. 

James, blood making a frantic journey southward, repaired to their cabin.

James sat at his cabin’s little desk sketching the scene: on deck with a crowd of men, Francis and Ross locked in combat across the center of the page. Francis with the high brow, the wide, crooked grin, knees bent and tusk reaching over his shoulder like the follow through of a cricket bat. Ross with a fist on his hip, nose in the air, brandishing the talwar with a pompous expression splashed across his face. 

James’s hair brushed the parchment and he pulled back. He hadn’t realized he’d bent so close to his work, squinting. He glanced out the window—the sun had sunk below the horizon, its rays reduced to orange reflections on the water. James sat up and stretched, rolling his neck, cracking his back. He stood to light the lantern and then took his seat again, holding his sketch out to see the whole of it. Sometimes, one could be too close to a thing to see it for what it was.

Francis’s footfall announced him. James looked up to find him posed in the doorway with the narwhal tusk planted on the floor. James sat back and snorted.

“Feeling smug, are we?” James said.

“Winners often do,” said Francis. 

He stepped inside and reached for the blanket to wrap the tusk up. He caught sight of James’s work and stilled behind his chair. The heat of his body soothed the chill in James’s own.

“I didn’t know you still drew,” he said, voice low as if there were a spell between them that could be shattered by idle talk. Perhaps there was. 

“Yes, well.” James swallowed. He repressed the dueling urges to slam his notebook shut and to flip through its pages to reveal everything to Francis.

“You’re very good,” Francis said, squeezing his shoulder. James looked up at him and found him smiling fondly. “I always thought it would be one of your great accomplishments, and I was right.”

“The Royal Society never did take my animal sketches,” he said, and Francis huffed a soft laugh through his nose. His hand lingered on James’s shoulder. James’s breath came heavier; he parted his lips.

“I’m a member of that venerable association,” Francis said. “Perhaps I could put a good word in.”

“That would be good of you, Francis.”

A tension rose and stretched in the taut silence between them. James’s heart threatened to rabbit out of his mouth. The hand on his shoulder tilted, and then James felt Francis’s fingers touch the ends of his hair, as one might graze flower petals on a stroll through a garden. His breath shuddered out of him. He slid his chair back and Francis’s hand fell away, but James turned and pressed his face into Francis’s belly, eyes squeezed shut. Beneath the linen of his shirt, James felt Francis’s stomach tense. 

“James,” Francis rasped.

James shifted enough to lay one hand on Francis’s hip and the other on the inside of his thigh. It was muscular and powerful; he felt like a child embracing the trunk of a tree. He felt like a child not at all. 

James nosed between the buttons of his shirt and kissed the skin there. He breathed him in, his scent intoxicating, redolent with sweat. Francis gasped and behind the placard of his trousers, he twitched and firmed. His hand swept into James’s hair and cradled his head, holding him close. James hummed, squeezed his thigh. He swept the tip of his tongue forward to taste the sweat that lingered in the hair of Francis’s belly.

Abruptly, Francis stepped back, only to bump his head on the bulkhead,

“Fuck,” he hissed. Another step back and Francis was caught in the tangle of his own hammock. James stood to face him fully. The cockstand tenting his trousers forth rendered him absurd, to be sure, but Francis had one to match, and of far more ludicrous proportions. Was he truly going to claim not to want this with his manhood making all announcements to the contrary?

“Francis.”

“James, we can’t.”

James laughed bitterly. A chill racked him from the inside.

“Will I always be that child to you, Francis?” he said. “What will it take? Another ten years? Twenty? I can wait. By God, I can wait. Just tell me how long.”

Francis was panting, nostrils flaring. His cheeks were livid even as the rest of his face seemed to drain of color. He looked flayed.

“James, you don’t want this,” he said. “You can’t.”

The laugh that issued forth was ugly and barbed. James whirled around to seize his notebook. He opened it to a random page and held it up for Francis to see. The specifics mattered not at all: James knew Francis would see a portrait of himself on every page. He blinked down at it, incredulous. James began to flip through, quickly, thoughtlessly, uncaring. Francis, Francis, Francis. Going back to the first days of this calamitous expedition: Francis. Every page and every doodle, every arc of ink graceful or rough-edged: Francis. 

“I have loved you for more than twenty years,” James said, voice harsh. “Do not tell me what I cannot want.”

One of Francis’s eyebrows arched nearly off his head while the other drew down into a pinch. He tugged the notebook from James’s hands and flipped through more slowly. He blinked and blinked.

James closed his eyes and turned his face away. His prick had deflated and left him feeling heavy and tight, as if his blood had trouble pumping again after freezing in his veins. It seemed, however, that once the spigot that was his mouth had opened, he could not stem the truths that poured from it. He could not give a damn about the consequences when he was finally _speaking_.

“I wanted you to bugger me even then,” he said. “Does that shock you? I was a feral little thing and no mistake. You stood behind me as we approached Baffin Island, so proud and pleased to give me my first glimpse of this beautiful, wild place, and Francis—” He squeezed his eyes shut and tilted his chin up, shaking his head slowly side to side as if savoring a scent on the wind. “—I have thought of that moment a thousand times since, thousands upon thousands of times as I abused myself—quite happily, to be sure.”

“James.” Francis’s voice was destroyed, as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of gravel.

James opened his eyes and forced himself to look Francis in the face. He was wide eyed, nostrils flaring, mouth hanging open under livid cheeks. 

“I wanted unspeakable things. I wanted your mouth on me, your prick in me, your arms around me in that narrow berth. I would steal away with a candlestick into that bloody cupboard you were always finding me in. I carved our initials into the wood. JF + FC. Can you imagine? I can. I did. You would spirit me away from my mortifying, loveless bastard’s life, we would travel the world, we would sail to Ireland and Brazil and deepest Africa and richest India and everything in between. We would find that thrice-damned passage even as you plundered mine.”

“ _Christ_.” Francis’s cockstand was back. James licked his dry lips and forged on.

“Is it worse, somehow, to know that while the particulars became less extraordinary in my persistent daydream, I never grew out of it? _He will send for me to join him on his whalers’ rescue, and we will be the toast of the Admiralty,_ I thought. Or, _We’ll map the land masses of Antarctica and kiss before a colony of penguins._ Or, _He’ll see me as a man at last, and when Sir John is asleep…_ ” James’s throat went dry, and another pathetic facsimile of a laugh croaked out of him. “I am a prize fool.”

“What about Le Vesconte?” Francis said. He looked at James as if he were a troublesome spirit, come to haunt his ship. As if he vexed Francis even as he made him hunger. It broke over him like the dawn: Francis believed him to be lovers with Dundy.

A guffaw cracked out him, an ugly, creaking thing.

“Le Vesconte,” he said, “like many of us, wants things he cannot have.” He shook his head and plucked his notebook from where it dangled at Francis’s side. “I will go to him now, see if his cabinmate would oblige his old captain with a switch. Goodbye, Francis.”

He stepped to the side to make his way out with what dignity he had left, but as he passed Francis lunged, twisted his hands in the soft knit of James’s gansey, and pulled James toward him. James toppled down into that broad chest and they both fell half-standing into the hammock as Francis tipped his face up and caught James’s lips in a devouring kiss. Francis’s lips were thin and firm, his mouth a hot wide cavern when it opened under James’s shock. He was a force unto himself, consuming and enveloping James in his gravity—and yet the touch of his tongue, when it came, was gentle and unobtrusive. A delicious tease that caused James to give chase.

James had not been kissed much in his life. Furtive dockyard assignations and the rare visit to discreet brothels in the Orient and near-east were not the stuff of romance, in whose realm he had privately placed the act of the kiss. Those kisses he had endured had left him vaguely sickened, as though a squirming mollusk had invaded his mouth and obliged him to spit its filthy juices out after it. He had wondered with some pique if he simply did not like kisses. If he were simply not destined for romance. 

He felt drunk on Francis’s kisses now. He felt as if a utopia had been opened to him at last, and it was the welcome of Francis’s mouth, his heat, his tender tongue, the hard hands buried in James’s hair, tilting him back to kiss him deeper, to mark and claim him. James’s weight rested fully on Francis and they swayed maddeningly in the hammock, unable to gain the leverage to grind properly into each other’s pricks. 

Francis bucked James off of him with a grunt of frustration. James stumbled back and blinked blearily at him. He pushed himself backward in the hammock only to spring forward and land, lightly as a cat, on his feet. They stood there regarding each other in a daze, chests heaving, pricks yearning toward one another in an absurd parody of Francis’s sword fight only hours before.

“Long have I castigated myself for wanting this,” Francis said. His voice was thick and rough. 

James shook his head, took a step toward him. He reached out and Francis caught his hand. He pulled it up to his mouth and pressed a kiss into the palm, the wrist. James’s breath left him unevenly, and when Francis let his hand go and looked up at him with worshipful eyes, he slid it round Francis’s jaw to cup his face.

“I’m older now than you were when I first knew you,” James said. 

A rueful smile twisted Francis’s mouth.

“A fact which the heart knows but the mind cannot fathom,” he said. He stepped forward until they were chest to chest. Cock to cock. 

“Seems other parts are on board, Francis,” James said. 

“Parts not known for their deliberation and measured hand.”

Francis’s own hands came up to cradle James’s head. He drew his thumbs over James’s cheekbones. James’s eyes fluttered shut.

“You deserve better than a bitter old man about to be sent down and forcibly retired,” he said. “You should be with someone your own age. Someone handsome. You can’t blame me for thinking you and Le Vesconte a good match.”

“You’re my match, Francis,” James said. “Forgive me the unbearable sentimentality of it, but I’ve known it all my life.”

Francis exhaled and closed his eyes. He rested his forehead against James’s. 

“Then I must endeavor to be worthy of your conviction and your esteem.”

James wrapped his arms around Francis’s neck and pulled him in tight. Francis locked his arms around James in turn. Nose buried in the soft exposed skin between Francis’s neck and shoulder, James breathed him deep. He knew that smell. Bone deep and foundational, like language, like breathing, he knew that smell. Francis. The embers of his desire licked back to flame. When he pressed forward, Francis’s prick rose to meet him. 

They kissed again. Long, drugging kisses that made James feel as though he were no longer of the earth, no longer of this body—he was vapor and cloud, heat and throb. He was the wanting and the having. 

They navigated around the hammock, and when Francis sat on the edge of the berth, James sank to his knees before him, bracketed by his thighs. Francis gazed upon him with naked awe. James pressed his face into the placard of his trousers, nuzzling the great column trapped behind it. Francis let out a moan that was mostly hot breath, propped himself up on his elbows, and leaned back in the berth.

James eased Francis’s trousers open carefully over his cock and it bobbed free, a proud Titan that curved gently toward his navel. It was thick as James’s wrist, flushed dark pink, the head straining already from the bunches and folds of his foreskin. His bollocks were heavy and full, dusted with fine hair in grey and gold. James’s mouth watered.

“Christ, Francis,” he said, breath rolling hotly over Francis’s prick. It twitched at the attention, and Francis held his head up to meet James’s eye. James’s smile widened at the quirk of his brow. “I knew you were hiding a great brute between your legs.”

Francis’s cheeks blushed deeper, which delighted James no end. He raised and dropped one shoulder.

“It is not usually so…obtrusive.” He swallowed. “You’re very inspiring.”

“Lucky me, then,” James said, smile widening. He winked. “ _Mr._ Crozier.”

Francis’s eyes widened and he sat up.

“None of that!” he said.

James chuckled and squeezed around the root with both hands, drawing the foreskin back further. Francis moaned and dropped his head back, exposing the flush that creeped up his neck. James gathered his saliva and pushed his lips over the smooth, slick head. It slid in snug against the roof of his mouth, stretching his lips and forcing his jaw wide. Francis grunted and twitched his hips. James moaned around his mouthful, eyes fluttering shut.

It had been some years since he had pleased a man this way, but the intoxicating rhythm of it came back to him with ease. He sucked and bobbed over Francis’s steely flesh, even as he pulsed the back of his tongue over the slit. He slurped and moaned and took him deep as he could manage until his prick and the nest of hair from which it rose were slick and sloppy with his enthusiasm and his tongue was singing with the salt of Francis’s.

Though his jaw ached and the corners of his mouth were strained, James sucked on. He wanted the ache that would come from this—wanted to remember Francis wanting him so badly it marked him, changed him, echoed in him. He left one hand on the base of Francis’s cock but reached down to unbutton his own trousers and shimmy them off his hips and down below his arse. His prick bounced out happily, but he ignored it. In him thrummed a deeper hunger.

He reached behind himself to press two spit-slick fingers against his hole. It pulsed with blood as surely as his cock did, winking and grasping for any satiation. He groaned and took Francis’s prick deeper, forcing the back of his throat to relax around him. Francis made a strangled sound and sat up. Tears were leaking from James’s eyes at the exertion, but Francis wound his fingers gently through James’s hair and held on at the scalp as if to soothe him.

“Christ, but you’re a fucking miracle, James,” he said, voice ragged. “You are more than any earthly thing.”

James pushed a fingertip inside himself and forced Francis’s cock down his throat as far as he could manage, moaning all the while. Francis swore and clutched his hair. He sat up and bent over James’s head. He stroked his hair and rubbed his cheek into it and babbled on a range of subjects from James’s beauty to the glory of his sucking mouth to how he tried not to dream of this day and night. 

With a cry Francis pulled James’s head away and tilted his face up to plunder his mouth again. James grunted and gave himself over, finger slipping from his hole. He clutched at Francis’s hips, his disheveled trousers.

“I want you, Francis,” he said, panting, between kisses. “I always want you, God help me.”

Francis stood abruptly and knocked James back. He had no time for confusion, for Francis was on his knees behind him in an instant, crowding him against the edge of the bunk.

“Turn,” he said. “Turn over for me.”

“Oh, _God_.”

James kicked his trousers away and laid himself over the bed, knees spread wide on the floor. His prick swung heavily beneath him. He reached back and spread himself for Francis’s perusal. He felt open and wanton, wanting Francis to look at this, the deepest and most secret part of himself. Wanting Francis to see him. 

Francis pushed James’s shirt up and stroked over his back and sides, and down over his arse cheeks. He nudged James’s hands away to hold him open himself. James heard him sigh, felt the touch of his breath as it passed over his electrified skin. Thumbs petted the edges of his crevice as Francis looked his fill. James clenched his hole.

“Have I ever seen such loveliness?” Francis said. 

James hummed into the cot and rocked back. He pushed a hand down to offer succor to his aching prick. Francis bent over him and pressed his chest to James’s back. He had lost his shirt while James wasn’t looking, and all he felt was the soft heat of his skin. He scraped his teeth lightly over the base of James’s neck. He sucked shapes into his neck, his shoulders. James moaned and squirmed, grinding his arse back into Francis’s hips. Francis stroked down his sides in long, soothing lines.

Francis moved down James’s back, kissing all the while. James arched and writhed into the contact. His arse was pulsing and his prick leaking.

“Francis, please,” he said. 

Francis dragged his teeth over the small of his back and down the crest of his arse cheek. James whimpered. He thought of that spyglass against his eye. That first glimpse at the jut of a great iceberg reaching into the clouds. The cold of his ears and the heat of his excitement fizzing up his spine. Francis solid and steady behind him. 

Francis licked a firm stripe over James’s hole. James muffled a shout into the bedding. He nearly jerked back into Francis’s face, but Francis held him still as he set himself to the task with zeal. He growled and groaned as he lashed and sucked at James’s hole, hands squeezing his arse cheeks all the while. James’s vision dappled and his world narrowed into one of shocking sensation. 

James had imagined this act in the most hidden and shameful corners of his mind. How filthy—how sordid. Who should choose to debase himself thus for the likes of James Fitzjames? He had never dared ask for it, even when he was paying. But he had thought of it. Nearly since the first flutterings of his sensual life, since the original discovery that his arse was as a portal to rapture, he had thought of it. How he had longed for a clever tongue to soothe his basest desires. In his raucous life he had taken a delicious parade of objects, fingers, and cocks—but none had prepared him for the way each touch of Francis’s tongue catapulted him to new heights of ecstasy. 

It was with tender feeling that he realized that this act he had been so ashamed of wanting did not feel sordid. Francis’s hands were worshipful, his mouth keen, his sounds euphoric. Under Francis’s ministrations, James felt desired. He felt loved. If he had believed that an invert such as himself were barred from the happy comforts of love, those delusions were shattered now. He nearly sobbed from the joy of it. 

His hole had grown slack and slick, and he was greedy for more.

“Francis, I need you,” he said. “Francis. Francis.”

“What do you need, James?” he asked.

“Your cock,” James said, breath leaving him in a rush. His hole winked and clenched around an aching emptiness. “Please, your cock inside me, Francis, I need it.” 

Francis groaned into his arse and rose up on his knees. James felt bereft, but Francis caressed the curves of his arse like something precious. James shifted and spread his knees wider, tilting his hips up in invitation. Francis drew a thumb down his crevice and passed over the hole lovingly. James muffled a whimper into the bedding.

“Please, Francis,” he said.

“Not like this,” Francis said. He cleared his throat. “Into the berth with you. I would look upon your face as we join.”

James’s chest quavered. Another first for the evening—none who had entered him before had done so looking at anything but the back of his head, or, more likely, the wall or floor beside it. 

He rushed to comply, and to rid himself of his shirt. Francis rose to his feet before him, broad of chest and shoulder, powerful of thigh, thick in the middle but strong for it. His arms and legs were corded with muscle. Even his feet looked rugged. Best of all were his eyes, which blazed to look upon James in all his bared flesh. Francis knew things about him he had never had the courage to tell anyone—and still he beheld him thus. James shuddered and laid himself back. He reached out a hand and drew Francis into the berth, on top of his body.

James parted his thighs to allow Francis to settle into the cradle of his body. Francis draped himself over him, careful of their bits and bobs, and cupped James’s face in both hands. He smelled of James—sweat and musk and arousal. It enflamed him. 

“May I kiss you,” Francis said, eyes at half mast.

“Please, please kiss me,” James said, and Francis did. He kissed him long and hot, as if kissing him were a great privilege with which he should take his time. Kissed him as if he were treasured above all else. James wished he could bottle this feeling and sip of it forever.

Francis shifted and maneuvered James’s legs so his knees were upright, bracketing Francis’s shoulders. He pulled back and stared down at James, eyes drawn down his body. He laid a hand over his cock and James bucked into the contact. Francis gave him a single squeeze but moved on when James moaned. He slid his hands under James’s arse and tipped his hips upward to expose his hole to the low lamplight. He bent to kiss it again, and James’s eyes rolled back. Soon, two grease-slicked fingers replaced his tongue and pulled against the walls of his arse. James clenched around the penetration.

James wanted to keep his gaze on Francis—brow knitted in concentration, blush spilling from face to neck to chest like a watercolor—but he was helpless but to lay his head back and let his eyes fall shut as Francis opened him up. Another finger slid in with ease, but Francis was patient. He worked him open until a fourth finger could enter, the fit tight enough that James grunted and jerked his hips up. Francis stilled.

“Easy, James,” he said. “You’re so lovely. You’re doing so well.”

“Francis, I’m ready.”

“Just a bit longer, James.”

Francis curled his fingers gently and pressed against the gland of pleasure seated within him. James shouted and writhed, the sound of it clapping between the bulkheads. Francis grinned at him, amused, but hushed him.

“They’ll hear,” he said. James, pleasure still shocking through him, tucked his lips behind his teeth and tried not to moan.

Francis rocked his fingers in James’s arse and rolled his wrist so the knobby line of his knuckles stretched him out. James felt on the verge of weeping from the bliss of it. He raised his knees and held them open with steady hands.

“Francis, _please_.”

Francis’s eyes flicked up to meet his, and then he pulled his hand out gently. James choked off a cry at the sensation, but Francis came up snug against him and pulled James’s arse into his lap. He greased his cock with lamp oil and set the broad head against James’s hole. He held James’s gaze, and James felt as though he and Francis were seeing each other in a fathomless space where all was bared: their history, their pain, their fear, their frustration, their mistakes, their desperate loneliness. All was bared and all forgiven. 

Francis eased his cock into James’s arse and the sight was struck from his eyes as he spent in copious ropes all over his own face, chest, and stomach. His arse spasmed around Francis’s cock and he cried out, body shaking. 

“Oh, fuck, Francis,” he panted. “Oh, God.” He was mortified, ready to diminish into nothing. He had waited too long. Two decades, three years, half an hour—however it could be counted, it was far too long.

But Francis only bent down and licked the spend tenderly away from his cheek, his lips. Kissed him with abandon. Pressed his cock further into James’s body, a massive, exultant stretch the likes of which James had never felt before. He pulled his knees up higher and bore down to take Francis deeper. Francis kissed his neck, his shoulder. He grasped his hair and sucked the flesh just below his ear before he raised his head to look James in the eye again.

He pulled nearly all the way out and then thrust back inside. James’s arse clenched and throbbed around his girth and he breathed out a moan. His eyes fluttered shut, but Francis pulled his hair with a gentle squeeze and he blinked them open in a daze.

“Look at me,” Francis said. His voice had fallen low and rough. “Look at me, James.” 

James looked.

Francis rose up and hauled James’s legs up to sling his knees over his shoulders. He leaned down to tangle his hands in James’s. A thrill lit his spine at the touch of their palms together. Francis began to fuck him, slowly at first, and then with increasing urgency. There was nothing like this, nothing like the wide stretch of Francis’s cock claiming the deepest part of James’s body, nothing like being pinned and fucked open and exposed, so full of love and cock he felt he might choke with it. He was brimming with Francis and aching for more. James did not look away.

Gone was the harried master’s mate who rumbled him from his hiding spot all those years ago.

Gone was the dashing young man James had first loved, with all his heady ambitions ahead of him like rosy mirages. 

Gone was the slave to the drink, embittered and inert, blaming the world for his ills.

Here was Francis Crozier, captain, confessor, leader of men. Weary and passionate and compassionate. Stripped of delusion and stronger for it. 

Here was Francis Crozier, who had saved one hundred and three men from certain death at the icy end of the world by considering them before himself. 

Here was Francis Crozier, who had shown James what courage was. Who had loved James into a new understanding of himself. 

Here was Francis Crozier, lover of James Fitzjames.

Francis’s breath came heavy, limned by moans he could not suppress. James squeezed his hands, his cock. He shuddered and leaned down to kiss him again. He snapped his hips in desperate stutters, rhythm grown erratic. The shift in position caused his prick to batter at the gland inside James without mercy, and trapped James’s prick between their bellies. James’s pleasure tightened and quivered, and without warning he spent again and again in a series of triumphant epiphanies like a line of fireworks ignited.

“James, James, James,” Francis was chanting when James drifted back down to himself. Dazed, James forced his eyes open and met Francis’s. Francis’s mouth opened in awe and then he choked out a gasp. His hips jerked and twisted and then stilled. He keened and James could feel the pulse of his cock as he spent inside him. James embraced him, let his legs fall and stretch out. Francis sank on top of him with a final grunt. 

James ran his hands up and down his back, which was damp with sweat. He kissed the side of his face, his ear, his neck. He closed his eyes and felt him there with him. Inside and around him. Present and alive.

Francis’s cock slipped from James’s arse. Francis grunted and James moaned, clenching around the sudden emptiness. Francis glanced up to meet his eyes but shifted away. He leaned over the berth and collected his shirt, then nudged back between James’s legs to press it to his arse, which was leaking Francis’s elementals, no doubt. James gave a weak laugh. Up went Francis’s eyebrow.

“Now I can tell everyone Captain Crozier’s wiped my arse,” James said.

Francis snorted. 

“With my own shirt, no less. It needed a wash anyway.” A laugh bubbled out of him, and then another and another until they were both giggling away in the berth, which was certainly big enough for two if those two did not not mind a tight fit. 

“Tell me you’ll leave off that bloody hammock now,” James said. 

“Oh, I don’t know, I quite like its unique compression of my spine.”

James wrapped his legs around Francis’s trunk and pulled him in. With a laugh, Francis tumbled to his side, slinging an arm over his soiled belly. He kissed James’s shoulder and nuzzled the damp hair at his armpit. He breathed him deep. James sighed, almost another laugh, dizzy with happiness. He turned toward Francis and Francis stretched out on his back, reaching an arm across the berth in invitation. 

James’s heart flipped about like an excited bird in the cage of his ribs, and he threw an arm over Francis’s body and laid his head snug into his chest. Francis groped about and then pulled the bear pelt over them. Peace settled over them. There was the creak of the ship’s timbers, the gentle rock of the sea.

“I wanted this,” James said into the drowsy dark. Francis was stroking lazy fingers through James’s hair.

“Mm. I as well.”

“No, I mean exactly this. When I was a ship’s boy. I wanted to climb into your berth and burrow into your chest where it was surely safe and warm. I was convinced a good cuddle would shield me from all the pitfalls and dangers of the expedition.” He huffed out a rueful laugh. “Of _life_ ,” he said.

“Christ, James,” Francis said. “All this time. I still can’t fathom it.”

James fell silent. In the corner of the cabin, the lantern dimmed until it snuffed out for lack of fuel. James pressed himself closer, pressed as much of his own skin to Francis’s as he could manage. Breathed of him. He smelled of salt and exertion, a masculine musk. The warm Francis-smell that ignited all of James’s memories. Gone was the lingering scent of whiskey, the sour notes of his bitterness. Gone was the odor of unwashed filth that had dogged them all in the final days of their Arctic exile. Francis’s breath evened out and he stopped twirling James’s hair between his fingers in favor of haying his hand on his head. 

“What’s going to happen when we’re back in England?” James asked. 

“Court martial,” Francis said. “I’ll be sent down, no doubt. They’ll pin another medal to your chest.”

“I’ll accept no medal you’re not given, Francis,” James said. “And that’s not what I meant.”

“Ah.”

“So.”

“You say you won’t sail again,” Francis said.

“No,” James said. “I fear I will have to cultivate a new vocation.” 

“Then so shall I,” Francis said.

James raised his head. Francis had been rendered blue in the dark, and his eyes glittered up at James like reflected moonlight.

“Truly?”

“I do not think I can bear to be parted from you again, James.”

James kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him. 

“Take me to Ireland,” he said when he pulled away. “I have always wanted to see it.”

Francis smiled. He reached up and traced the line of James’s jaw.

“I fear you should be as disappointed as any other proper Englishman.”

“Good thing there are no proper Englishmen here.”

Francis’s thumb rested on James’s lower lip.

“Thank God for that,” he said. 

“Perhaps…perhaps we can start anew somewhere else. Portugal. Spain. Somewhere warm and far from the prying eyes of English society.”

“‘Where you go, I will go,’” Francis said. “‘And where you stay, I will stay.’”

James’s throat grew a knot.

“‘May the Lord punish me, and ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me,’” James finished for him.

“I was always partial to Ruth,” Francis said.  
  
“Will we be well, Francis?”

“Yes.” Francis pushed the hair back from James’s face and pulled him back down to his chest. “More than well. We are going to be happy, James.”

James listened to Francis’s heartbeat. It came slow and steady, and his breath evened out to match it. James’s thoughts meandered. Francis, letting him into his matchbox quarters with a meal and a hammock. Francis, ensuring his safe delivery to Uncle Robert upon their arrival back in England. Francis, face open and eyes bright upon meeting him again ten years later, before it all went wrong. 

“Did you think of me when you were in Antarctica?” James asked, and Francis startled.

“What?”

“Were you asleep already?”

“James.”

“I thought of you all the time, when you were there. I was angry at you for going without me. Did you really have a penguin on the ship? Did you really dance the quadrille with Sir James?”

Francis sighed and rubbed his back.

“Go to bed, Jamie,” he said. 

James closed his eyes despite the glee that sparked through him. He imagined something new: He and Francis are gamboling through a colorful market arm in arm in the warm air, Portuguese rollicking like music all around them. They are picking out fruits and cheeses. They are going to go home and make fresh bread, start a batch of jam. They will watch the sunset over the blue sea, framed by staggering cliff faces. They will sit side by side, and reach for each other’s hands. They will forget they know what cold is.

**End**


End file.
